Patchwork
by Lynse
Summary: Sam's leaped again, but this time things are different. The original history's in flux, and Sam is left trying to puzzle out the mystery of one Doctor John Smith who seems to be caught up in the middle of it. Crossover with Doctor Who.
1. Chapter 1

A/N: In the Quantum Leap universe, this is set immediately after _Star Light, Star Bright_ and immediately before _Deliver us from Evil_. If you have not seen _Star Light, Star Bright_, then expect spoilers and minor confusion as the story progresses. There are some references to past episodes, too, but the ending of _Star Light, Star Bright_ is given away, I will admit. In the Doctor Who universe, this would take place sometime between the Christmas '08 special (_The Next Doctor_) and the Easter '09 special (_Planet of the Dead_), with references to past episodes through to the end of the fourth season of the new series. Very few references to the classical series, I'm afraid; I've not been privy to the majority of the episodes. Please note that a cursory explanation of both universes will turn up within the course of the story.

Additional note: I'm slowly making a few edits to this story to make it easier to read, but the storyline remains the same.

_Disclaimer: I don't own these characters, and I make no money from this work of fiction!_

* * *

Sam Beckett blinked for a moment before getting his bearings. The situation didn't appear life-threatening, which was definitely something to be thankful for. He was alone, which meant he wasn't about to embarrass himself by having to respond to an unknown question. It was early. He was in a kitchen, perhaps in the late 60s or early 70s judging by its décor, which seemed to be rather new. He was dressed in a plain brown housecoat with worn moccasins on his feet and nought else on but a pair of boxers. Closing the refrigerator door that he found himself holding, he picked up the glass of orange juice on the counter and drained it.

The tangy taste felt good; his mouth was dry, sometimes, after leaping. And the act itself was ordinary, and it was normal, and he was comforted by the fact that he could spend some time getting used to this new leap. Generally, even the ones that started out normally enough ended up with him in a terrifying situation, whether the danger was physical or emotional. Other times, the danger would start almost instantly—like being shot at, for instance. That had happened all too soon for him, more than once.

He studied his reflection as best he could in the window. The man he had leaped into was a bit shorter than he was, he thought. He was perhaps forty years old—there were telltale wrinkles around the corners of his blue eyes. Though clean shaven, the man had short, scruffy brown hair that demanded a combing. Sam tried to smooth it out with his fingers, thinking that, with his luck, the doorbell would be ringing within the next few minutes and he should at least appear passably acceptable when he answered it, particularly when he wouldn't know until the other person spoke whether or not they were good friends with his host. Not that he fancied answering the door in his current attire, anyway.

The thought pushed Sam to continue a normal morning routine. He found the bedroom, getting a better look in the mirror this time, grabbed some good quality clothes that were suitable for the cheery morning weather, and proceeded to wash up and get dressed. He headed to the front door to get the mail, but found the mailbox empty and the front step devoid of a newspaper. He wandered back to the kitchen, deciding to fix himself a spot of breakfast. Spotting a pile of mail on the table, however, he decided wait on that and instead find out who he was and when he was until Al showed up to tell him what he was doing here.

The bit on the top was junk—addressed to the occupant of the house—but he found a phone bill underneath addressed to a Mr. William Rivers. A local newspaper for the town of Millbrook announced the date to be May 7th of 1969. Sam reached for the newspaper to discover the current events and see if anything jogged his Swiss-cheesed memory. As he picked it up, something fluttered to the floor.

"A lottery ticket?" So Mr. Rivers decided to try his luck at those things, at least once in a while. With better odds of being struck by lightning than winning the jackpot, Sam wondered for a moment if he was here to change William Rivers's fortune along with his future, even though Al had assured him on many an occasion that it was his own rule not to use future knowledge to his—or his leapee's—own benefit.

"Sam?" Al Calavicci asked, appearing in the middle of the table. Realizing this, he hastily stepped away from it. Sam nearly jumped, not expecting to be pulled from his thoughts so suddenly or frankly so soon. "Listen, Sam, you're William Rivers, and you go by Bill. It's May 8, 1969, and you're in Millbrook, Connecticut. You're a physics teacher at the high school and you—what've you got there?"

"Lottery ticket." Sam showed it to his holographic friend. Al was his only link to the future, his present, and even if there were a lot of things Sam didn't remember, he doubted he could ever forget Al Calavicci—at least for a second time. It had been a bit of a shock that first time, realizing no one else could see or hear the man. After all, he didn't exactly blend into the crowd. Right now he was clad entirely in green, and while he may have passed as an oversized leprechaun on St. Patrick's Day, it didn't seem to fit in here. Then again, Al was Al and he wouldn't be Al if he wasn't dressed in some outrageous outfit or another. Sometimes, a small bit of normal insanity was enough to make sense of the storm of unreason that surrounded Sam's life.

"Funny. Bill Rivers doesn't seem to be the gambling type; tried and true thing for him. Think it's a winner?"

"Al, that doesn't matter. Why am I here?"

"Well, that's just it. Ziggy could get a lock on you, no problem, but none of the scenarios we've run so far have come up with a probability greater than 12.3 percent—not that we got much before our friend in the Waiting Room clammed up, at least until I have time to go and reason with him. I thought I'd drop in and see how you ended up; sometimes you know before we do."

"Not this time," Sam muttered, watching his friend take a puff of his cigar and study the device in his hand.

Al punched a few buttons on the handlink and shook his head. "No, you aren't here to make a…." His voice trailed off and he frowned. The handlink erupted into a series of squawks, protesting the data. He hit the device a couple of times, and eventually the handlink began to function again, but his expression didn't change. He looked up. "Sam, Ziggy maintains that in the original history, William Rivers never bought nor in any way attained a lottery ticket. That's not supposed to be here."

"What? Are you trying to tell me history's changing now? Before I've even done anything? That time's in flux?" Sam looked upward, wondering what God or Fate or Time or whatever had in store for him now.

There were a few more beeps from the handlink as Al punched something in. He let out a low whistle. "Ziggy gives it a 94.7 percent chance."

"Oh, boy."


	2. Chapter 2

Sam arrived at the high school with time to spare, having followed Al's directions to get there. He set up for his class (and familiarized himself with the room) before heading to the teacher's lounge; he hoped that he would overhear something that would explain what he was there to do. Instead, he found himself engaged in conversation before he could blink.

"Lost without Jack around, eh, Bill?" one woman asked, laughing lightly. "I swear, you two could swap classes for the year and the students would get just as good an education. This must be the first morning in years I haven't walked in on you two drilling each other on one thing or another."

"Yeah, you could say that, I suppose," Sam said uncertainly.

"I'll bet you were the first one Jack told about winning the lottery, too. He swore up and down to me that they hadn't even bought it—just found it slipped under their door one morning. Janet confirms it, of course, but she's always been willing to overlook some of his bad habits if something's in it for her. Still, that family—their luck is sometimes unbelievable. He's taken two weeks' leave!"

"In my opinion, he's as lucky as we are that we found someone to fill in for him. I doubt Donald would have let him go for so long otherwise." The second woman shook her head. "I've got to get back to the library. I'll see you in second period, Bill, when your class is in to find materials for their research project."

"Oh, er, right." Sam gave a weak smile and wished Al would show up to not only tell him who these people were, but also to say that Ziggy had figured out what he had to do to leap out of here. He stumbled through a bit more conversation before excusing himself.

When he made it back to the classroom, he found a tall, skinny man flipping through one of the textbooks. He was dressed in a brown pinstriped suit and had a head of unruly brown hair. As Sam studied him, trying to figure out who he was, the man looked up and grinned broadly, closing the book with a snap and dropping it back on the shelf.

"Hello, pleased to meet you. I'm John Smith." The Englishman grinned and stuck out his hand.

Sam smiled back, although a part of him wondered about the man in front of him. "Bill Rivers. I teach physics, as you can tell." He motioned to the textbook. "So you're the one who's taking Jack's place for a few weeks?"

"Yup. History. Love history. And physics. And most anything else. I think I've garnered a fair bit of knowledge over the years, specializing in a few things that get my interest, but you can't have a decent conversation with someone when they haven't the foggiest what you're talking about, and I know some of my past companions would say that that wouldn't stop _me_, but it would be a relief not to get a blank look and have to repeat myself until I'm blue in the face, for although most people would say I've got an extraordinary breath supply, if they really and truly can't grasp the finer details of something like, say, quantum physics, then why should I ramble off about it?" John, who had rattled this off at a hundred miles an hour, took a deep breath and appeared to be readying himself to launch into another monologue. Sam felt a brief bit of pity for the students in the man's class who would be taking notes.

"It's just hard to get a decent conversation these days," John continued. "Well, when I say decent, I mean interesting. Well, when I say interesting, I mean odd. Quite a lot of things are odd. The sky is blue, isn't that odd? The light hits the atmosphere and all the molecules scatter the wavelength, being influenced by an electromagnetic field to induce the short-lived attraction of the dipole-dipole moments, and here the short blue wavelength is scattered the furthest, isn't that odd? Lots of things are odd. But of all the oddities in the universe, do you know what I still can't understand? Why does toast always land butter-side down? Mystery of the universe, that is."

As Sam tried to process everything John had said, the man had continued to walk around the room and comment on things. He finally interrupted John's monologue, asking, "How did you know we'd be in need of a substitute teacher?" It was a risky question, but the man wouldn't have introduced himself if he had taught here before, Sam reasoned.

John grinned again. "Didn't know, really. I was just passing through, saw they needed a teacher, and thought I'd try my hand at it again." He stopped, considering. "Taught physics at one school; job didn't last long. Then I was a professor at a boy's school, but I can't say I remember much about that."

"Have you been in the States long?" Sam asked, thinking the man would have lost some of his accent if he had been there for any significant amount of time.

"Nah," John answered easily. He reached up to scratch the back of his head, frowning a bit. "I never do have the best of luck here; always seems that one thing or another is cropping up." His face broke into a smile. "But that's what makes it fun, isn't it? Bit of a mystery this time; don't know why I'm here. I'll just have to stick around to find out." John Smith walked nonchalantly out of the room, hands thrust in his pockets, leaving Sam to stare after him.

"Loony tunes, Sam. That's what he is."

"Al!" Sam jumped, wondering how long his friend had been there. "Do you know why I'm here?"

"Well, Ziggy's been going through some more data that's turned up, and there's a 54.2 percent chance that you're here to save a Dr. John Smith from being killed."

"What?" Sam glanced at the door of the physics room. "Al, that was the guy who was just in here; what could he have done to make someone want to kill him?"

"According to Ziggy, whoever shot him wasn't intending to kill him."

"What were they trying to do, shoot him in the leg like in the movies?" Sam frowned.

"Not exactly. It seems your friend was trying to save someone else when he was hit."

"And I have to make sure both of them survive? Who else is it, then?"

Al looked a bit uncomfortable. "Bill Rivers."

"What?" Sam stared at Al. "Once, just once, I'd like to get a leap where I'm not risking life and limb to change something." He stopped. "Is Ziggy sure? If there's another variable here—"

"Ziggy's running different scenarios to try to figure out what happened. Whatever did change, it doesn't appear to be significant enough to develop a noticeable and traceable ripple effect. Tina's holding out that Ziggy didn't have the data and that things just appeared to be changing."

"So you're not sure." Al merely tilted his cigar in consideration. Sam rolled his eyes and threw up his hands. "Well, that's just great, Al. First you tell me something else is at work here, and then you come and tell me it's all been a mistake. Hasn't Ziggy come up with anything tangible in either direction?"

"Well…."

Sam began pacing the room, trying to piece together everything he knew since he'd leaped in that morning. "Lottery ticket, lottery ticket, what's so—" Sam snapped his fingers. "Lottery ticket! Jack, Jack somebody, the history teacher; he's just won the lottery. They were saying he'd found a ticket slipped under his door. He's just taken a leave."

Al shrugged and punched in a few buttons. His eyebrows rose at the results. "Ziggy says that Jack Selvin worked here until 1974 when his wife Janet divorced him because…oh, he had a gambling problem. Ruined his reputation because of it, too. There goes your theory, Sam."

"No, Al, they said that he'd said that he hadn't bought it. Look, if Bill Rivers can mysteriously find a lottery ticket, why can't Jack Selvin?"

Al was about to protest when the handlink squawked. "Ziggy says that Jack never took a leave in the original history, not even sick leave."

"But he's the one John Smith replaced; if I'm here to save him, then why isn't _he_ in the original history?" Sam frowned. "See what Ziggy can find out about him."

"Sam, are you nuts? We might be able to hack some records to find out about this guy, but with a name like John Smith? From the British Isles? Do you know how long that would take? If you could narrow it down, then…." Al waved his cigar. "Then we might have a chance." He consulted the handlink, adding, "Unless you care to wait six—" here he smacked it and it let out a squawk "—teen days."

"What? No, look, Al, at least come up with something. He told me he's taught before, but he doesn't sound like the type to hold down a job. Run a description of him; you know what he looks like. Maybe there are some photos..."

"Okay, Sam, but Ziggy's not making any promises." Al opened the door to the Imaging Chamber and looked back at Sam. "Just see if you can figure anything more out around here." The door whooshed shut and Sam was left alone again.

* * *

Sam survived the day, but by the end of it he was wondering how he'd managed it. Most of these students simply did not _want_ to learn the material he was trying to teach them. He had described the intricacies of light and its peculiar double nature, being both particulate and wave, to one class, and one student had the gall to almost drop off to sleep. It was appalling. The chattering, the note-passing, the giggling, the snide remarks—it seemed that they would do anything except listen to him or try their hand at their assigned work.

The second class with the research project had been a blessing in disguise; with the students able to pick their own topics, they at least showed some interest in his beloved subject. One had even listened to his explanation on antimatter with notable interest. But the class that followed... Suffice to say that he was relieved, for the second time in his life, when the bell rang to signal the end of class.

He lingered outside what he now knew to be the history classroom. The students were long gone, but he suspected Dr. Smith would still be inside. If not, then perhaps the man had left something that would give him a clue to track down some data on him. It was not something he liked to do, but he knew Al would insist on it. He was about to go in when he heard John muttering something. Pausing just outside the door, Sam strained his ears to listen.

"Funny sort of spike, though. Some kind of energy signature, and I've seen it before, but I can't think where…." There was a whining, buzzing sound for a moment or two which abruptly cut off. "Definitely not alien, not on its own, but then again, ATMOS. Maybe if I try this…."

From what he could gather, Sam was beginning to think that Al was right; John Smith had gone round the bend. But even if the man talked nonsense to himself, that didn't change what Ziggy _had_ come up with—he saved Bill Rivers from getting shot, and now Sam had to return the favour before he had cause without getting hit himself.

He knocked twice before pushing the door open. "John?" he called. The man whirled around to face him, tucking something into his pocket and whipping a pair of thick-rimmed glasses off his face.

"Oh, hello there," John said cheerfully. "Wonderful students, don't you think? I was expecting to have trouble getting them to participate in class, but they seemed quite willing to partake in our little discussion." He frowned for a moment, then brightened. "But not _too_ willing. Natural, I'd say. Curiosity can drive a man to do great things, sometimes foolish things, but great. Slowly at first, mind, but steadily gaining speed and reaching new heights. Like the moon landing. Brilliant." Sam's mind caught on that phrase, but John steadily continued. "Nice year, 1969, though it can get a little tiring. No matter; six months, twenty-two days, eight hours, twenty-one minutes, and forty-three seconds until 1970. Well, now it's thirty-eight."

Sam looked at him in surprise. "You calculated that just now?"

"Of course. Not much to it. Bit rudimentary, but I wasn't up to much else."

"But if you've got such a brilliant mind for mathematics, why were you drawn to history?"

John's grin threatened to split his face. "Always liked a bit of history. Sequenced order of events, not meant to be changed, the odd meddling aside, but to relive any bit of experience makes it much more real. Catches the interest of anyone; certainly had my students interested when we were discussing the Napoleonic wars. Taught history at my last post, too, if I remember correctly. Physics before that; abnormally bright students there, but that's been sorted. Told you that before, didn't I? I've been sure to dapple in a bit of everything; there's an entire universe of knowledge out there, Bill Rivers, and it's best to be prepared."

"Right." Sam was beginning to feel distinctly uncomfortable; he wished Al

would come back and give him some more information. "Look, I heard you talking to yourself earlier; did you need any help with anything?"

"Nah." John waved the offer off. "Not at the moment, but if I do need help, I'll be sure to track you down. This is just a bit of a special project for me, you could say."

Sam managed to keep him talking, which in reality was quite easy, but he didn't learn much from it. It was as if John could babble on for hours without saying anything. Sam wondered for a moment if the man suspected anything, but discarded the stray thought; few people had even dreamt of wonders like Project Quantum Leap, and the fortunate selection who worked on the Project today wouldn't have yet believed such a thing could be so—even for him, the idea was little more than a gleam in his eye, a consistent thought niggling at the back of his mind, building and growing, ever dynamic.

In the end, the good Doctor Smith had excused himself, telling Sam that he must check up on something very dear to him, although when Sam pressed, the man merely smiled and winked. Of course, when Sam mentioned this to Al in a later conversation, the man had started laughing, insisting John Smith must move pretty quickly if he had already found his own girl. However, it was not until a conversation that occurred much later that evening that Al had anything to report. Apparently, with a bit of coaxing, Ziggy had been convinced to devote a bit more power to tracking down the info. Although, in response, the parallel hybrid computer was in a bit of a huff and had denied Gooshie access to a certain little side project he was running. Even so, Al was optimistic when he came to visit Sam at Bill Rivers's house that night.

"Okay, Sam, it appears that this John Smith was in downtown London on May 9, 1969, and he and a Negro woman—the report didn't give her name; it's an unofficial one, poorly documented—helped save a young boy who was hit by a car. There wasn't much in the account, but the boy's mother described him, albeit with a bit of embellishment, and it fits; apparently he materialized out of the crowd and his quick action saved the boy's life. There are other reports of John Smiths, but they don't seem to fit. Ziggy's still working on it."

"Al, Ziggy's got to be wrong on this one. This guy isn't going to be in London in twenty-four hours; he told me himself he's got the job here until Jack comes back from vacation, and he'll be teaching tomorrow. It's Friday."

"Yeah, well, Ziggy says there's a 98.6 percent chance that this is the same person."

"But that's impossible! He'd have to be in two places at once."

"Well, we brought that up, and Ziggy just said that you are, too. You're here, as Bill Rivers, and you're back in Elkridge, Indiana, as yourself." Al paused for a moment, considering, and then added, quietly, "And if you keep leaping, Sam, you may end up here again."

Sam pushed that thought away and pursued another, somehow more comforting, thought. "Are you trying to tell me this guy's another leaper?"

"According to Ziggy, there's a 17.9 percent chance of that." At the look on Sam's face, Al said, "We ran the scenario, and there's nothing, nada, for evidence to support that, except for the whole idea of being in two places at once. And we can't confirm _that _unless you're with him, because for all we know he could be jumping on a plane at this moment."

"But this time, that 17.9 percent may be right. Al, what if someone else has managed to come up with this? What if it _is_ Project Quantum Leap, but in our future?" Although incredulous at first, Sam was warming to the idea. He couldn't suppress the tiny bubble of hope that sprang up at the very thought of the possibility. Another leaper. Someone else, just like him, out there, fixing things. Someone else who may very well have the technology that could help Sam get back home….

"Sam, your Swiss-cheesed brain seems to be forgetting something. If he was leaping, he would have leaped _in_ to someone, just like you have."

"Well, how do you explain how he could mention the moon landing so casually? One of the biggest events of 1969, and it hasn't happened yet, but I know he mentioned it as a mere passing reference, as an example of ingenuity. How would he know about that, then?"

"Well, maybe he's psychic!" Al snapped, exasperated. "Sam, it's 1969. You know, and I know, that in less than three months _Apollo 11_ lands on the moon, but everyone else knows that it's going to happen soon enough. He could have referenced it on the assumption that it was going to happen."

"That's not good enough, Al. There's got to be more to it." Sam frowned and began pacing. "Look, let's assume the guy Ziggy tracked down is the same one. Is there anything else, _anything_, even remotely related? Birth records, marriages, deaths—this guy has to have had family. Bills or deeds or something. I want evidence that this is the same person, because if he is another leaper, somehow, then maybe he'll know how I can get home."

"Sa-am." Al shook his head, taking another puff of his cigar. "Look, if you think this John Smith was leaping with his own body, then why do you want us to—" Al broke off. "You think he didn't live in 1969 and that, to leap out of there, he had to save that boy."

"Exactly. If he has no records, then he must be another leaper."

"Or he was lost in the system, or he was just visiting—"

"Al, he has an Estuary accent. He can't have just been visiting. Besides, he told me he only visits America from time to time, so he must be from the British Isles. That, or he's a very good mimic."

"Well, I'll have Ziggy check on it, but don't get your hopes up. You're reading more into the situation than there is."

"Al, you just need to have more faith. Can you imagine the possibilities if I was right? What he could tell us?"

"He probably couldn't tell us anything, as laid out by your own rules. If you questioned him, he'd evade you one way or another. He probably wouldn't think that you're anyone but Bill Rivers living 1969 through the way it was supposed to be."

"But that's just it! If history's changing for us, then it's changing for him! He'll have to know something is different from the average leap. He's bound to investigate."

"Yes, and if he thinks you're anyone but Bill Rivers, you might not leap, Sam." Al punched the handlink, opening the door to the Imaging Chamber and moving to stand just beyond the doorway. "Right now, your job is simple. Keep your head down, go with the flow, and see if our John Smith is at work tomorrow, because if he's not, all your hypotheses can be thrown out the window. And if he is…. Well, keep an eye on him. I'll be back when Ziggy's found something out."


	3. Chapter 3

Mr. Smith taught all of his classes the next day, Sam discovered. Apparently, the man also had a knack for making the history come alive, telling the classes all sorts of little quirks that weren't found in the textbooks. Sam wished he could do as well, but there were only a handful of students across his classes that seemed to really enjoy physics, and nothing he could say to the others seemed to motivate them. He had spent the last half of his final class explaining how to complete the problems—again—and had half a mind to teach them derivatives, but knew while a bit of calculus might help the more advanced students, the ones who had trouble with other math would simply be more confused.

In the end, he knew he was better off sticking to the textbook, and he finally had the satisfaction of a job well done when the face of one of the students lit up in understanding. Another had fashioned his own theory, which admittedly did work for the question they were doing at the moment but would fail the minute another variable was thrown in, a concept Sam had trouble explaining to him. The bell rang in the middle of his explanation, so Sam hurriedly finished it up, but he knew by the time Monday rolled around, the majority of the class would have forgotten anyway. He suspected that, unlike he had when he had been in school, they left their assignments until the last minute.

John was in the history classroom again when Sam stopped by to casually ask more questions. The man seemed to carry on entire conversations with himself, but it was not, as far as Sam could tell, how people perceived _his_ conversations with Al. Sam figured it looked as if he was talking to someone who wasn't there; John seemed to be explaining things, but nothing he said made a whit of sense.

"Haven't spent this much time in one place since, oh, the time I was…no, no, not that. Probably…no. No matter; other things at hand. Rose would know the right questions to ask, but—" John stopped. "Donna would be through the files and—" It was as if he couldn't bring himself to finish his thought. "Martha would…and Sarah Jane…even Jack. And Romana…or…but…. Oh, now, look at this." John's voice was focussed again, with a clear note of interest replacing the melancholy. "There's that other spike again, look at it! Ah ha, that's brilliant! Just need to figure out the pattern, and then that'll narrow it down for what's causing it, and then I'll find it and be on my way."

"To think you're the one that ended up in a nuthouse," Al commented, nearly causing Sam to jump out of his skin.

"What does Ziggy say?" Sam hissed, moving away from the classroom door.

"Well, she refuses to give a straight answer; keeps saying 'data inconclusive' and that something is stopping her from accessing all the archives, and not just in London; says it covers most of the British Isles. Gooshie's trying to reason with her."

"Al, you said you wouldn't come back until you had some more information."

"Well, we've been investigating the event we did turn up. Ziggy had to get around a number of blocks to get to the official report; surprising, for such a small thing. Apparently the Negro woman was a Martha Jones; she had a job in a nearby shop, but we ran the name and it's long since been torn down. And this John Smith had been with her; they witnessed the accident. There's not much about either of them, but Ziggy's working on getting a home address for this Jones girl. If it wasn't a chance meeting, she might be the lead to this John Smith of ours. Or at least his long lost twin brother." Al shot a glance at the door. "That's the thing, Sam. That accident still happened, and that boy—Ian Miller—was still saved by a John Smith and a Martha Jones."

"He mentioned a Martha," Sam recalled. "Whole list of names, really. Rose, Donna, Martha, Sarah Jane, Jack, and Romana. He probably would have named off more, but then he found something. He mentioned a spike, like he was studying a graph, and then he—"

"And then he came out here to find his colleague talking to himself," John Smith said, striding over to Sam, hands in his pockets. "Very suspiciously, too. You see, Bill, I talk to myself, and I talk to things people normally wouldn't talk to, so I know, believe me, I _know_ when someone is talking to something and when someone is talking to himself. And you were not talking to yourself; you were talking to someone named Al. And if you were planning to make a regular stint of eavesdropping outside the classroom door, then you normally would not begin holding a conversation with yourself; you would instead be listening. Now, I've got very good hearing, and I could tell when you were listening to me and when you were talking to someone, or something, else."

Sam stared at John, wondering why he suddenly felt terribly afraid. He had been confronted, yes, but had not been accused of more than eavesdropping and, implicitly, secret-keeping. And it wasn't as if this John Smith was the one who shot Bill Rivers; he was the one who had saved him.

"Uh, Sam, Ziggy's just run the names John Smith and Martha Jones, and there is one match that you might find interesting. In 1913, they're listed as a schoolteacher and maid at the Farringham School for Boys, both of whom went missing. Ziggy can't seem to get any other details." Al had mixed feelings on this; had he never swapped places with Sam, Ziggy wouldn't even have the year in her databanks, but since he had, they'd been loading her with data from the last hundred years. They didn't want to risk being caught unawares again. But the thing is, they had no way of checking whether or not any of the data Ziggy turned up from the early years would be applicable to Sam. Smith and Jones, after all, were common names, and it was entirely possible that the pair they'd found listed in archives wasn't at all relevant. Their screening system was suffering. When they picked up data from that long ago, even if it was correct, they could never assume that they had all the pieces.

"Funny thing is," John continued, "this isn't the first time I've heard you talking to yourself. And sometimes I make these connections, you see, connections no one else would make. I've been getting some unusual readings, and I think you may be able to shed some light on them." He looked at Sam over the thick rims of the glasses he was wearing; Sam wondered when he had put them on.

"What makes you say that?" Sam asked nervously.

Suddenly dropping his serious tone, John broke into a wide grin. "Well, you're a physics teacher, aren't you? So you'll know something about physics. Not that I couldn't figure it out myself, but I'm used to explaining things, and I look daft talking to myself. Well, I _sound_ daft when I'm talking to myself. I _look_ daft when I'm wearing one shoe." He paused. "But you are hiding something, after all, or you wouldn't have asked why I think you can be of some help to me; you would have asked what sort of readings I've been getting. Or you would have stormed off long before, insisting that I didn't know what I was talking about. You certainly wouldn't still be here, listening to me, trying to see if anything I say makes any sense because you need some hard facts from me. I don't know what you expect to find, but I imagine you'll have a bit of trouble finding it."

Sam tried to form a plausible answer to John's implied question, but for all his leaps, he could never remember a time when he had met someone who could _talk_ so much. The man continued talking, going on about scientists being objective, but Sam focussed on Al's voice instead. "Can't be the same people, of course," Al was saying, although Sam was sure he sounded a little nervous. "Plus, they're common names. Smith and Jones. Besides, if we—" Al broke off. "Did he just say something about the Murchison meteorite?"

Sam blinked, but his Swiss-cheesed mind couldn't recall the importance of the reference. He remembered that it had fallen in Murchison, Victoria, Australia, but he couldn't think why Al would be surprised at hearing John say it. It might have been a bit curious, considering the man was a history teacher, but perhaps this was a hobby of his. Giving his head a mental shake, Sam began listening to John again; apparently, some of the things the man said could be clues to his identity. Al, in the meantime, was quiet, furiously punching things into the handlink.

"Classic example, that," John was saying. "Take it apart and study it and theorize about the findings. What did they find on it, thirty, forty different organic compounds? I really should know; I was there, but, blimey, it feels like a long time ago now. Can't've been more than a couple of years—I went there after…. But no matter. Point is, not all scientists can keep an open mind, not when they want the findings to reflect their hypotheses. What sort of scientist are you, Bill Rivers?"

Sam stared at John, who was gazing at him expectantly. "I try to keep an open mind," he answered slowly. "I try to ignore any previous information that may bias me towards or against something while analyzing it. I—"

"Even if it's impossible?" John pressed, cutting Sam off.

Sam smirked. To many people, time travel was impossible, but he had proven them wrong, even if they would never know it. "I try not to label things as impossible, just improbable. But, John, if you don't mind my asking, what sort of doctor are you?"

John looked at him for a long moment. "Oh, let's just say I'm a bit more than experienced than Pangloss with his metaphysico-theologico-cosmoloonigology."

"Uh, Sam," Al said hesitantly, looking up from the handlink, "the Murchison meteorite fell on September 28, 1969. Never mind the moon landing; this is something he can't have known about. Maybe you're right."

Sam fished around for something to say. He couldn't answer Al, not now. And this John Smith, if that was his true name—for Sam knew better than anyone that being a leaper meant adapting to and answering to dozens of names—if he was indeed a leaper, then he had never been talking to himself. He would have, like Sam, been talking to a hologram. A hologram which Sam could not detect and which might, at that very moment, be there just as Al was for him. A hologram who, like Al, was listening in on every word Sam said and correlating the data into some computer in the distant future, trying to hypothesize about John's purpose for being here as a leaper.

But something still didn't add up. Perhaps it was possible for this John Smith to leap with his own body and thus with his own name, being such a common one that it would not be questioned, but unless their missions coincided, he would still be present in the original history. And it was highly unlikely that their leaps would coincide this way, with one's purpose being to save the other; it raised the question of what the other was actually doing. Was it simply possible that whatever was leaping them around wanted them both alive and needed another leaper to keep the mission of the first from souring? Sam knew there were times when he hadn't, exactly, done what Ziggy had calculated was needed, but he had always managed to save the day somehow.

"Experienced how?" Sam blurted out, realizing he needed to say something before the silence stretched on too long and knowing that his brilliant mind had just been sidetracked by the strangest man he had ever had the fortune—or misfortune, depending on how circumstances turned out—to meet.

"Ah, that's the inquisitive side coming out, isn't it? Eclipsing the fear, pushing rationale aside. You can smell a good mystery, can't you, Bill Rivers, and you want to work it out." The grin resurfaced. "All the best of luck with that, I say, but I'd like a bit of help from you first. Tell me, have you noticed anything…odd...in the time you've been here?"

"Not really, no," Sam answered, thinking John was about as odd as anything he would ever experience—quantum leaping included.

"Recently, I mean, recently. Lately. In the past few weeks. Days, even. Days. Two, actually. Two days. Last two days." There was a slight pause before he added, "Anything? Anything at all? Any bells ringing? No?"

"There's you," Sam answered in a voice that he hoped carried a strong sense of him simply being there to humour the man before him. "You seem a bit odd. Turning up out of the blue like that."

"Ah, well, just passing through, like I said." John waved it off. "But no one's been acting strange lately, have they? That you've noticed?"

"No," Sam answered again, although he knew there wasn't a chance he'd be able to tell. "What does this have to do with those graphs of yours?"

"A bit more than you'd think." The answer was quiet, as if it was something John was saying to himself rather than to Sam. But just as suddenly, the inquisitor was back, brightly asking, "And the children are normal, yes? I mean, I'm not teaching a core subject; I don't see them all, so…." He trailed off as he saw Sam's face.

"What do you mean, _normal_?" Sam asked incredulously, wondering if Al was making anything of this conversation.

"Well…." John's hand was reaching behind his head again. "No children being abnormally smart or anything like that? Saw a bit of that a few years back and had to sort that out. With help. Had the help of some old friends. Couldn't've done it without them. But! We're talking now. Present day, 1969. Strange knowledge, smells, actions, words, anything?"

"Sam, maybe you should just—?" Al jerked his head towards the door. "Whatever is with this guy, he's not stable. Maybe he's become tuned into some sort of psychic thing that let him know about the meteorite and he's lost it?"

"No," Sam said definitely, answering both Al and John at the same time. "That doesn't make sense, anyway."

"Well, it would make perfect sense if I'd had time to explain it properly, which I haven't." John looked offended. "You'll still have a look at those graphs, won't you?"

"Of course." It was the only way Sam would have any concrete evidence of what John was doing, and hopefully he'd be able to decipher what it was from the collected data.

Al seemed to realize this but didn't advise it as the best course of action. As John disappeared into the classroom, he figured it was safe to resume his conversation—at least it wouldn't be one-sided any longer. "Sam, how could he have known about the meteorite? Even if he is a leaper, and it was in a past leap, would he remember that much about it? You don't recall everything from your leaps, do you? And certainly not in terms of when they were—do you? He said it had been a couple of years ago."

"He might remember those sorts of things," Sam said, unsure of what exactly he could say to Al. He couldn't choose what the gaps in his memories were; unless he thought back to them, he didn't always realize they were there—not until Al made some sort of offhand comment that made him recall something that simply had eluded him. "But for me, in terms of _when_, it all begins to run together. Day after day, leap after leap, person after person, life after life. It's all there, or at least most of the pieces of it, but it's not exactly easy to arrange in chronological order, even for me." Sam had a feeling Al sometimes underestimated the effects of a Swiss-cheesed brain, as the man's only time leaping had been brief—not to mention the fact that he and Sam had experienced melded personalities for the duration.

"Well, the guy in the Waiting Room hasn't been much help. This John Smith turned up shortly before you leaped in, so we don't have any information on him. And Bill refuses to believe anyone would want to shoot him; he claims he hasn't any enemies, or at least none that would want to kill him. Ziggy's having trouble pinning anything down. She's still unwilling to project a probability on any scenario surrounding the shooting, claiming insufficient data. Frankly, we're not even sure that's what's going to happen, not anymore."

"So this John Smith is my best bet about finding out why I leapt in here?" Sam threw up his arms. "Al, it's been almost thirty-six hours since I arrived; how long does Ziggy expect me to go blindly blundering on? A 54.2 percent chance isn't exactly the best odds I've been given. Have they changed?"

Al hit a few buttons on the handlink and frowned. "Ziggy's having trouble accessing the databanks here, now. Gooshie, what's going on?" Al listened to a reply only he could hear. "Well, can't you get around it?" Another pause. "What is that supposed to mean?" Rolling his eyes, he turned to Sam. "Look, I've got to get back. Something about the handlink and then all these blocks popping up and, oh, forget it, I don't even pretend to understand it. Keep an eye on this guy, Sam; I'll check in on you and soon as Gooshie and Tina are through with this."

John reappeared from the classroom just as the door to the Imaging Chamber swooshed shut. "I've got it all set out now; you should be able to make sense of it." He waved Sam inside.

Sam wasn't sure what he expected, exactly, but while the graphs themselves were fairly straightforward, the man had a few more cobbled-together inventions than Sam would have expected from a simple history teacher—although he knew that there was no way this man was simply a history teacher. The first of the spikes, which seemed to measure an unusual increase in energy use, regardless of form, was off the charts, while subsequent, lesser spikes were inconsistent in their appearance. There were others, but they were more likely to be simple blips on the graph than anything actually related to the initial spike. Sam couldn't see anything in the odd machines scattering the table that would be able to measure the energy, certainly not something that would measure it regardless of form, and he *wasn't convinced that this wasn't all some sort of elaborate joke.

"This doesn't make any sense," he said at last, finally turning to John.

It appeared as if the man had been explaining something, because he broke off and looked a bit surprised. "Well, I did say it would make sense if I had the time to properly explain it, but somehow I never do. But this is interesting, don't you think? Look here; a scan for residual artron energy, and although it's minimal, it's still there. But it only relates to that first spike, with traces showing up elsewhere without a discernable pattern." He looked up at Sam. "Any ideas?"

"I'd be able to help more if I knew what I was looking at."

"Well, that's not really necessary, because I doubt you'll have any particular ideas that I haven't already come up with, but I figured if you're going to hang around outside the door and listen, you might as well know what I'm talking about."

"So you didn't mean a word when you went on about how I might be able to help you?"

"Nah, that was just to get your attention. Besides, I've seen your first impression now; that narrows it down. And that's really all I needed from you." John hunched over the graphs again, muttering to himself.

"Narrows what down?" Sam demanded. Finding himself ignored, he tried again. "How did you measure that, anyway? And what are you looking for? Are you just—?" He found himself cut off by an abrupt exclamation.

"Oh, it's a primitive teleport, a precursor to a transmat!" John slapped his forehead, then continued, straightening and beginning to pace, his words picking up speed, eyes wide as he ranted to an invisible audience. "That's why the signature's familiar but not recognizable; it's not refined, the kinks haven't been taken out of it. It's limited, so it's still cycling through a set time, working on a set and retrieve withdrawal mechanism, reaching in and rearranging and still exchanging, functioning with a cloaking device to allow for a smoother integration; brilliant, really, years ahead of its time, something I should have noticed earlier. But! That _means_…" John drew the word out and wheeled on Sam "…that someone here isn't who they seem to be."

"Oh, and that's why you were asking me all those questions earlier?" Sam hoped he sounded more sceptical than nervous. He had a feeling that those were the first unguarded words John had spoken to him, aside from an occasional slip, and Sam was beginning to think that perhaps Al was right. To make things worse, if this guy was a leaper, it meant that this was something that could eventually happen to Sam, if he didn't get home soon enough. It was an unnerving thought.

John closed the classroom door, pulling something out of his pocket as he did so. Sam could hear a buzzing noise and then the click of the lock. When John turned around again, his glasses had come off of his face, and he looked different from before. It wasn't a change that Sam could put his finger on, exactly, but he knew it was there. And it wasn't that John's right hand now lightly clasped a slim silver cylinder, presumably the thing that he had used on the door, however that worked.

"Well, you're not a clone," John said, studying Sam carefully, "but I daresay you aren't Bill Rivers, either."

"I beg your pardon?" It wasn't hard for Sam to look incredulous.

"I demand you tell me who you are." John's tone meant there was to be no passing thought of argument. When Sam didn't answer, he continued, "Species designation, planet of origin, galactic coordinates—"

"I don't know what you're talking about!" Sam protested, thinking the man was clearly mad. "John—"

"There's no point pretending. I may not know what you are, yet, but I know you are not Bill Rivers, and believe me, I _will_ find out what happened to him. In accordance to the universal ratification as set out by the Shadow Proclamation, name yourself!"

Sam desperately hoped that he wasn't ruining his chances of ever leaping out of here. "Sam Beckett. Dr. Samuel Beckett. What are you going on about?"

"Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, you aren't getting rid of me that easily. Why are you here?"

"I'm not exactly sure about that," Sam answered slowly. "I never am."

"Then how did you get here?" The suspicion hadn't faded, but a note of curiosity had joined it.

"I leaped. That's what we call it. I leap from life to life, putting right what once went wrong. It's time travel within your own lifetime, you see. It's an experiment, but it's gone wrong, and now I can't get back. I stepped into the quantum accelerator, and then…." Sam shrugged. "I didn't know much of anything when I first woke up. I knew my name was Sam, but beyond that, nothing else. I didn't even recognize Al."

"And who exactly is Al?" The eyes were narrow still, the metal cylinder held a little more tightly.

"Rear Admiral Albert Calavicci; he's the program observer. He's tuned into the mesons of my optic and otic neurons, so I can see and hear him. He's a hologram to me, just like I am to him. Sometimes others can see him, if their brain chemistry is similar enough. But young children do, and animals, and the mentally—"

"Hold up, there. Neurological hologram, created by a subatomic agitation of the carbon quarks, as you say—yeah, I get that." John's eyes flicked to the graphs and back to Sam again. "He was just here, wasn't he, but he's gone now, yes?" At Sam's nod, John continued. "Right, then. This explains a bit, if it's true. Hold on a tic, then, just need to confirm something." The hand with the instrument went up and Sam found himself staring into the blue light at its tip. After a moment or two, John stopped, pocketed the device, and settled on the tabletop, arms crossed, looking back at Sam. "Well, then, explain this theory of time travel to me."

"It's the LoNigro String Theory of Time Travel. You see, your life is like a piece of string. You tie the ends together and your life is a loop, and if you ball the loop, different parts of your life are touching each other out of sequence, and—"

"They touch each other." John Smith repeated grimly, interrupting Sam. "And if this were possible, you could go back on your own timeline and change things." He frowned. "First rule of time travel: you can't go back on your own timeline and you can't change things once you're a part of events. Or at least that's how it should be. Tends to get nasty when you ignore that, and then I have to come along and fix it."

Sam tried to comprehend exactly what John had just said but had to file the words to the back of his mind to mull over at a later time, perhaps when he could talk freely with Al. Instead, he chose to correct John, saying, "It's not on my own personal timeline, exactly. Not usually. I tend to leap into other people's lives—people I've never met."

John was frowning now. He looked at Sam quizzically. "So you've only changed small things—never had a brush with history? Nothing, like, say, the assassination of President Kennedy?" Sam couldn't bring himself to answer, and John continued, talking more to himself than to Sam. "I remember that. I thought there had been a shift, just a slight one, but I thought it was just…." Why John's face betrayed so much pain as he mouthed the words 'part of the aftermath', Sam couldn't say.

"It was six years ago," Sam said, trying to bring John back to the present. "Perhaps your memory's playing tricks on you." He had no idea what John had meant by a shift, but he knew as well as anyone that imagination sometimes tried to fill the gaps in a person's memory, generally with little success in terms of an accurate reproduction of events.

John was shaking his head. "Longer than six years, for me. But you were there, weren't you? It's happened for you, hasn't it? Yes, of course it did. I can tell by the look on your face. You must be terrible at poker."

It didn't seem to make sense to Sam that the man was a leaper, not when he was unfamiliar with the string theory. Yet he clearly wasn't an ordinary man—not when he had knowledge of things that had yet to happen from the perspective of May 1969. Perhaps Al was right and his truths were simply the ravings of a madman, but that didn't quite seem right. He was eccentric, yes, but he seemed to be brilliant. He did, after all, understand that Al was a neurological hologram. Then again, unless he was a leaper, he shouldn't even have that knowledge.

"Who are you?" Sam asked finally. He wasn't expecting a direct answer.

"I'm the Doctor," John answered. "I hadn't told you that before, so when you asked what sort of doctor I was, I knew full well that you were the one I was looking for. Just needed to confirm it."

"Even if it is Dr. Smith, my question still applies, and you didn't answer it."

"No, no, no, John Smith isn't my real name. It's just a bit hard getting a job without it. People always want to know your name, and I've gotten more than a few strange looks when I tell them it's the Doctor."

"Doctor wh—?"

"Just the Doctor," John interrupted. "That's what I'm called. The Doctor. Blimey, this is about as repetitious as the 'it's bigger on the inside' bit. You lot never learn, do you? Can't you ever just accept anything as it is? Well, no, of course you can't, that's what makes you unique, all those brilliant, pesky little questions you ask when you're trying to understand everything."

"It's what?" Sam repeated, thinking he surely hadn't heard correctly. John—the Doctor—hadn't actually said 'it's bigger on the inside', had he? That was physically impossible; it completely shattered all the laws of physics Sam knew by heart.

"Never mind that now. Tell me, exactly how long have you been leaping?" The quizzical look was back. And he was the one saying Americans asked a bunch of questions? Al would be rolling his eyes, saying the people from across the pond could talk.

"I don't know," Sam answered slowly. "I don't remember. It must have been at least a couple of years, but for all I know it's only been months."

"And what time frame? When were you born?"

"August 8, 1953, but I've leapt a few months prior to that date, if I remember correctly."

"And probably no further ahead than the time you left. Mind you, could be wrong; I've been wrong before. Well, half-wrong. Well…." There was a shrug and a shake of the head before the questioning continued. "And when was it you left? What year did this all start?"

"Sam, what have you been telling him?" Sam's heart jumped into his throat at the sound of Al's voice and he wished fervently that Al would stop sneaking up on him. "I'm telling you, that guy's loony tunes. If you tell him who you are and he _believes_ you, you might not leap! And before you bring it up, it was different with Tibby. You weren't yourself. And we certainly didn't explain everything about Project Quantum Leap to him!" Sam opened his mouth to say something else, but Al cut him off again. "And before you say a word about John Smith here not being mentally absent because_ he_ can't see me, I'll remind you that not everyone in the nuthouse could see me, either."

John—the Doctor, Sam resolved to remember—seemed to notice his distraction. He immediately consulted his instruments and nodded to himself before saying, "So, Al's here. Well, Al," he said brightly, looking in the same direction as Sam, "perhaps you could tell me how long Sam's been leaping?"

"Sam!" Al turned on his friend in exasperation. "Did you explain everything?"

"Oi, there's no need for that. He was just answering questions. And I have a very honest face, don't I? Better than the last one, I expect, for that, although I'm rubbish at lying this time 'round. At least for very long. _Any_way." The Doctor took a deep breath. Sam recognized this as a cue that he was about to launch into what could be a very lengthy speech.

But something didn't make sense. The Doctor had started talking to Al as if he could see and hear him. And that wasn't possible. No one could just suddenly start seeing him when he hadn't before. Sure, the Doctor was rather odd, but it wasn't like he could automatically reconfigure his brain pattern at will to match Sam's.

The Doctor's next words, however, made Sam wonder if all those questions about what sort of scientist he was weren't just for show. "I can tell you're wondering what exactly to make of me," the Doctor said, "and before you ask, it's a relatively simple matter for me to reconfigure my brainwave patterns to match your friend's over there and lower my shields enough so that I can see and hear you, because I've had quite enough of hearing one-sided conversations about myself, particularly when you're speculating in entirely the wrong direction, but I won't go there, so suffice to say that once I knew what I was dealing with, it was a simple matter to complete the necessary alterations. That was rather succinct for me, I think. Lovely word, succinct, although a little on the stuffy side; tend to prefer short and snappy at these times, although you need to use _precisely_ the right tone. Sorry, off on a bit of a tangent there, where was I?" There was a very slight pause, and Sam had the feeling that the Doctor wasn't going to let what Sam had told him go.

Sure enough, it wasn't long before the Doctor had started again, his words still coming at a mile a minute. "Oh, yes, right. That's about all you need to know about that. And don't bother searching for me in 1969 anymore, because between myself, Torchwood, and UNIT, you aren't going to be finding any more files than the ones you've already turned up, and I know you did turn some up because you found out about Martha, and you mentioned her specifically out of a number of my other companions, but don't contact her, whatever you do, because if you even try, I will have to stop you, and I really don't want to have to do that." A slightly longer pause, then, "I do expect an answer to my question, so don't think you've evaded it."

"It's been a couple years," Al said vaguely. He was not about to compromise the security of the Project at the demands of one odd stranger. "Gooshie? See if Ziggy can tweak the signal a bit. Our friend here can see me."

The Doctor frowned for a moment but then grinned. "No matter. I know you can still hear me, and if you want your privacy for the moment, I'll give it to you. But if you refuse to tell me how long Sam's been leaping, then the very least you can tell me is whether or not you've been through that whole Y2K bit."

Al glared at the Doctor. "Nosy, isn't he? Can't he mind his own business?"

"I'm always asking questions when I leap, Al," Sam answered reproachfully.

"Yes, but you've at least heard of subtlety. Usually." Al eyed the Doctor again. "You can tell him no. Can't see much harm in that. A bit of truth now might make lying easier in the future. I think my second, no, third wife used that tactic on me from time to time and thought I'd never noticed."

"No," Sam said, looking at the Doctor.

"Right, well, don't worry about anything strange that might happen when you're ringing in the new millennium. I sorted it all out. Although I expect you won't remember anything was ever off."

"So you are another leaper," Sam said, pleased to finally have irrefutable evidence from the horse's mouth.

The Doctor hesitated, pulling a face. "Eh…I think it would be more accurate just to call me a time traveller. I don't tend to do a lot of leaping. Had to hop for my life a couple of times. Usually I'm running. Especially recently. Funny thing about that running; half the time I'm running into trouble, and the other half I'm running away from it." A breath, followed by a change in topic. "But if this leaping always puts you in a certain place for a purpose, you must have had a purpose for coming here. I've been tracking you since yesterday morning, so regardless of what you told me earlier, you must have come up with a plausible reason for your leaping here. I need you to tell me what that is."

Sam exchanged a nervous glance with Al. Al was shaking his head, saying, "No, Sam, you can't tell him. You don't have to. Ziggy says things have changed now that you've been talking with him. So there's no point in sharing the first hypothesis, right?"

Sam sighed, replying, "Ziggy said that Bill Rivers was going to be shot, and that you were hit instead when you took the bullet for him. But she says that no longer stands now that we've been talking; history's changed."

The Doctor frowned. "From this little conversation? Nah. Not that would prevent that, anyway. Who was supposed to have shot you?"

Sam shrugged, choosing to ignore the Doctor's strange comments. Sam wasn't sure how the Doctor could claim to be a time traveller without claiming to be a leaper, but perhaps the man's version of quantum leaping was sufficiently different. He seemed to have recognized the string theory once Sam had described it, and he knew how the neurological holograms worked, but he asked some questions about things that would be illogical for another leaper to be asking. Maybe it was because, when he leaped, he retained his own physical appearance rather than taking on the guise of someone else. At any rate, he didn't seem to be as careful as a leaper should be, but perhaps that was because he already knew he was talking to another leaper. The casual references to futuristic events would have been to confirm his suspicions about Sam.

Yet at the same time, the whole idea was hardly plausible. What were the chances that the British government was funding a secret project on par with Project Quantum Leap and that the two projects would be in use at the same time without either colliding until now? True, most of Sam's leaps were concentrated in the United States, and he expected most of the Doctor's leaps would be concentrated in the British Isles, but wouldn't Ziggy have been able to find a trace of such a thing? The man had probably given up his name because he was leaping in his own body without adopting some else's physical aura as Sam did, and since he had suspected Sam of being a leaper, he would not have told him his given name for fear of the project's security, but if that were the case, why did he pepper them with questions?

"Ziggy doesn't have any information on that," Al told Sam sourly. "They'd never caught the murderer. Although that doesn't matter now, since it doesn't happen. We're still running scenarios."

"We don't know," Sam admitted to the Doctor.

"Then whoever it is is probably still out there," the Doctor said absentmindedly. "Never did like guns. Nasty things." His voice sounded hollow to Sam, as if he were remembering something unpleasant. "Still, you'll have had experience with this, wouldn't you?" Without waiting for an answer, the man launched on. "Just as well this is a small thing. I don't put as much stock in your history books, myself. All this one-sided, victor-biased recordings and writings of the glory or the overcoming of the horrible oppression or whatnot, and these people writing the history books always seem to write their opinion into their work, whether it's intentional or not. If something showed the victors in a bad light, they'd gloss over it. Sweep the dust under the carpet, cover up the blemishes of society, that sort of thing. Granted, my people were the same. Stuffy, pompous…." The Doctor shrugged, but Sam had been leaping long enough to become a good reader of people.

Consequently, he knew that although the initial flash of true emotion on the Doctor's face was almost instantly masked, the man was struggling to shrug off something more important than bias in the history books. Perhaps he had had some bad experiences in life, and maybe that was what had driven him to become a leaper himself, providing he was the creator of his project as Sam was of Project Quantum Leap. It was plausible enough; the Doctor seemed to understand the concept of time far better than anyone else Sam had met, surpassing even those who worked at the very heart of Project Quantum Leap itself. But if not the inventor, then the Doctor was surely someone as close to its creator as Al was to Sam or he would not have been granted the privilege of being a leaper. True, the different projects would have their own rules and regulations, but the concept surely remained the same. The element of trust, at any rate, would not change.

"He's a bit full of himself," Al commented, more than annoyed by the Doctor's contradictions of Ziggy's insistences. "When we get something concrete, Sam, I'll be able to tell you something, but in the meantime, meeting up with our friend over there threw a monkey wrench into our predictions."

"Bill doesn't have any enemies, does he?" The Doctor asked, looking keenly at Sam. He answered his own question, and Sam realized that the man was talking to himself again. "Nah, wouldn't fit the pattern. Not that there is much of one. Smart, actually. Plans tend to be foiled. Well, plans for evil. Though I have had plans to have a nice cup of tea and those have still been spoiled. Bit funny, that. Usually I'm the one who's mucking about in someone else's perfect plans. Got a bit of a talent for that. Still, Bill's not much of a target. Are you certain that he's the one the shooter was aiming for?"

"That was the initial belief," Sam answered, not wanting to commit either way. Al was certain it wouldn't happen, yet the Doctor was certain it would. Al and Sam had been through so much together and had fixed so many wrongs…but how many had the Doctor faced? Perhaps he was speaking from experience. Perhaps he, in his numerous leaps, was more able to say how much history would bend. But that would mean Ziggy was wrong, and Sam trusted her; he knew what went into creating her and how unlikely it was for her to be mistaken as an ordinary human like the Doctor would be.

Then again, if the Doctor was from the future, perhaps the computer at his base was more advanced. The thought staggered Sam, but it had to be considered. Perhaps the Doctor's observer had access to more advanced technology than Ziggy. This would put the Doctor's project further into the future than Sam's, which was already taken for granted as he had passed through the millennium, but it did speak of the technological advances that would come in the near future.

Sam knew the fundamentals of the project and the hypotheses and theories on which it was based, so he knew the Doctor would still be leaping within his own lifetime. The adamant aversion to leaping into one's own personal timeline was likely borne from personal experience, Sam figured. And the man in front of him couldn't be that much older than he looked, and he looked to be in his late thirties, though Sam supposed it was possible that he was in his early forties, since he would have been leaping far closer to his own future than Sam ever leapt if he wasn't—the span between the assassination of JFK and the year 2000 was thirty-seven years alone.

"He wouldn't have been caught in the crossfire?" The Doctor pressed, wanting more detailed information from Sam.

"No, according to the original history, you were the one caught in the crossfire, so to speak."

A laugh. "That's what you call it, then? The original history? As it was before you changed it? Makes sense, I suppose, although it implies that time is linear, and I can assure you that it is not, though I expect you've experienced that yourself, being in two places at once and all."

"What do you call it, then?" Sam asked, truly curious. The Doctor's statements were true enough; the man must have had plenty of time to ponder his life as a leaper.

To Sam's disappointment, the Doctor didn't give him a straight answer. "I just nudge history back onto its proper course every once in a while. It splinters if I leave it. So what I am doing is replacing the original history, what is supposed to happen. _How_ I do it may not be what is publicized, but the end result is the same." Sam's mind was buzzing with questions, many regarding simple clarification of the Doctor's statements, but the scientist had come back to the problem at hand. "So your original history initially stated that I was shot, correct? Wouldn't have been deadly, though, I expect. Things would be a tad more complicated if it was. But for me to have been shot in your original history, something must have already been off course or I wouldn't have been there in the first place. I wouldn't be here now. But I am, so there you are. If we find out why, we may be able to prevent this shooting."

Al had had enough. "Sam, I don't know who he's pretending to be. Maybe he is a leaper, maybe he's just a nutcase, but if he is part of an experiment, things have gone a little caca. If you could just go elsewhere to find some more tangible information, then we can speed up the process with figuring out what you need to do to leap so that you can do it and get out of this mess!"

It wasn't so much that Al was annoyed, Sam could tell, but that he was worried. He didn't trust the Doctor, whereas Sam was fascinated by the man's odd character. If he was making this up as he went, he was a far better actor than Sam. Still, the man's words and actions spoke of experience with time travel. Sam was confident that he hadn't misjudged that, and because of that confidence, he was certain that the Doctor was a leaper. There could be no question of it; sometime, in Al's near future, Great Britain had perfected a project similar to Project Quantum Leap, and the result was standing in front of him, clear as day.

"Ziggy doesn't have any data," Sam admitted, "so I expect you hadn't been told anything, either?" He phrased it as a question even though he meant it as a statement.

The Doctor looked up from the sea of graphs. He was wearing his glasses again. "This Ziggy isn't human, I take it. Electronic, then?"

"She's a parallel hybrid computer," Sam put in.

The Doctor nodded. "Works well enough, until they start working against you. A word to the wise, Sam; don't set her on fixing the world's problems by herself. She might decide the human race is due for extinction or ship them out to another planet for colonization. Granted, that won't happen in your lifetime. You're not even at the dawn of the true Electronic Age, not yet." Before Sam could question, the Doctor pressed on. "But me, I tend to go off what I've learned, so no one can feed me incorrect information." As Sam's face betrayed his indignation, the Doctor added, "I'm sorry, that was rude, wasn't it? I really have to watch it. I didn't mean to imply that that was _intentional_. It's part of human nature to make mistakes, and Ziggy would have been built by human hands, so error cannot be faulted. I've made mistakes, plenty of them, and not all of them I've been able to fully correct, but I've compensated." There was some forced cheer, Sam could tell.

"He's enough of an evader himself," Al commented, taking a puff of his cigar. "He never answered your question, not fully. But he hasn't told you much, has he? He's been asking all the questions."

Sam could understand why Al was a bit testy—Project Quantum Leap was top secret, and here he was, telling a complete stranger all about it. And as Al had pointed out, the Doctor hadn't said much of anything. But he was a leaper—he understood. Whether that was more dangerous, Sam couldn't say.

"How do you find out information about your leap?" Sam asked.

"My leap?" the Doctor repeated. "Oh, you mean this little trip. Most of it I just gather myself, when I'm here."

"See?" Al circled the Doctor, not caring that he was walking through the desks to do so. "Evasion. That's the second time you've asked." He gave up on his criticism and started to study some of the graphs and the notes jotted in the margins of some of the diagrams. "Sam," he asked suddenly, "you saw these, didn't you?"

Sam nodded—in reply to Al and in acknowledgement of the Doctor's statement. Although eager to hear what Al had to say, he knew he had to keep pressing the Doctor. If the man was in the mood to talk, and to actually say something of value rather than simply nonsense or vague references or generalities, Sam was not going to lose his chance. "How long have you been doing this? Leaping, or whatever your word for it is."

The Doctor blew out his cheeks and settled down on the edge of a desk to think. "Can't say I know exactly how many years. Feels like I've been doing this for lifetimes."

A long time, then. Sam knew the feeling well. "Did you invent the technology to allow yourself to do this?"

The Doctor shook his head. "Me? Nah. But you did, from what I gather, and I am quite impressed. A functioning transmat—sorry, quantum accelerator—in this day and age? Unheard of! Especially one adapted to feed off of the Vortex—without any detrimental side effects. Must've taken you years. More than—the better part of a lifetime, and a brilliant mind. Frankly, though, I'm surprised we didn't meet earlier, and I'm rather curious to find out why we've met up now."

It was the end of the question session before it even had a chance to begin. Al took the chance to talk. "These notes, Sam—how could you read them?"

That was a ludicrous question. "I do know more about science than you do, Al," Sam muttered, forgetting the Doctor's earlier comments about his excellent hearing. "It wasn't hard. Some of the concepts were abstract, but I realize now that that's because he's faked it all. There's nothing that can measure any type of energy, and I'm ashamed that I was even taken in by it. He just wanted to gauge my reaction."

Al was shaking his head before Sam had finished. "They aren't even in English! I know you're well-versed in languages, but I can't even figure out what this is."

"The papers he showed me were in English," Sam replied, wondering where Al was coming from with this. "I expect that's what he'd use for the most part, considering it is his first language."

Al stared at the papers again and blinked. They were in English, clear as day. But they hadn't been the first time he'd seen it; he was certain of it. Most of the letters were the same, he could tell, and it wasn't simply messy writing—the script wasn't an untidy scribble but rather a surprisingly elegant scrawl. But the thought that the characters could change was absurd. "I think I've been in here too long," Al mumbled, referring to the Imaging Chamber. "I'll come back later, Sam. I just need some coffee." A combination on the handlink later and the door opened, allowing Al to step back into the present and out of the holographic world that was all too real for Sam. When the door shut, Sam was alone with the enigma of the Doctor and the mystery behind their meeting.

* * *

A/N: Pangloss and his own brand of philosophy are a creation of Voltaire from the work entitled Candide. The Doctor _is_ impersonating a history teacher, after all; he might as well make a reference to a historic satire. The fact that the Doctor is often thought to spout nonsense and the fact that Pangloss's philosophy _was_ essentially nonsense is a bonus.


	4. Chapter 4

It was past nine o'clock, and Sam, fascinated though he was, was distracted by his hunger. The Doctor, who continued to ply Sam with questions and evade any put to him, did not seem to realize this. They had long since left the history classroom in favour of Bill Rivers's living room, but in his determination to discover what he could about the Doctor, whose differences in leaping could mean a way home for Sam, Sam had honestly forgotten that he would need food and drink at some point. Now, his stomach was reminding him of that fact.

"Can I get you anything?" he asked the Doctor, who was frowning at the graphs again. Why he had insisted on looking at them, Sam couldn't say; he was sure the Doctor knew that he knew the graphs had been faked. Any scientist would realize it.

"Hmm? Oh, no, no, nothing for me, thanks. What do you make of this?" He pointed to a small blip on the graph.

Sam wondered why the Doctor insisted on perusing the false data, but he decided to humour him. "Interference or human error, if it doesn't correspond to anything else, but I'd have to study it in more detail to give you a better guess. I'm going to make some coffee and grab a sandwich or two; are you sure you don't want anything?"

The Doctor assured him that he didn't, but he still seemed preoccupied. By the time the coffee was ready, Sam had polished off his sandwiches, and he brought the steaming brew back into the living room to resume the discussion. He wasn't certain how long the Doctor would pursue this, especially when their progress had been minimal at best. Any man would get discouraged, and Sam had to admire his persistence, but leaping demanded constant attention to avoid being caught out, and Sam was exhausted. Not to mention the fact that he had to mark sixty-some worksheets that had been assigned to the class the day before he had leapt in, and the brief glance he had spared them had assured him that he would be spending the better part of a day writing proper explanations in the margins of the short-answer questions for some of the students. He had already covered the topics again in class, and he hoped that a reminder would be enough for the majority of them.

"What do you remember about your last leap?" the Doctor asked, studying Sam closely.

The last leap. Which one was that again? They blended together at times, and it was hard for him to sift through the pieces of memory. Wishing Al was there to refresh his memory, Sam began slowly, saying what he knew for certain. "I helped a young man on the way to fulfilling a dream. Music, I think. He wanted to play music. But that wasn't why I'd leapt in, at least not entirely. I was the young man's grandfather, and the family thought he was becoming senile. They tried to put me in an asylum. The young man saved me, with his father. They realized that I didn't need to be put away, even though it had been their original intention."

"Why would they have put you in an asylum?"

Sam strained to remember; it had been fascinating, whatever the elderly man's obsession had been. His enthusiasm had spread to Sam, according to Al, and he remembered that Al had disapproved, but he couldn't quite put his finger on what it was. "I don't remember. It was thrilling. I remember feeling that it was a new discovery, a new chance. But I can't recall what it was."

"And you don't remember who you were?" Sam shook his head. "Or when?" Another shake. "Or if this discovery of yours was real or imagined?"

"No." Sam sighed. "It's frustrating, sometimes. And Al won't tell me, most of the time, even when I know there's something missing. It's my own rule, according to him. There are times when something will jog my memory, but usually I need Al to tell me. He has, a few times. In the beginning, mostly."

"So it's still there, you believe? It hasn't been lost?"

Sam shook his head. "There was one leap, when I leapt into an asylum, and they gave me electroshock therapy. Al said I took on the persona of a number of my leapees. It was breaking down our connection because I was slipping away. We nearly didn't get out of that mess, though I wouldn't have known. But I think it means it's all in here, what I've been through." He tapped his head. "It's the same with you, isn't it?"

"I remember where I've been," the Doctor confirmed. "Sometimes too clearly." He didn't give Sam the chance to ask for any clarification, instead pressing on. "But if you still remember everything, even if it's just on an unconscious level…."

"Yes?" Sam prompted, curious.

"Do you trust me?"

He shouldn't. He barely knew the man, but the knowledge that he was another leaper, that he had been through similar experiences, comforted Sam. Here they were now, working together so that they could leap out of here unharmed. Al would name reasons against it—they couldn't find any information on him, he didn't answer their questions, and he spewed off more nonsense than anyone had at the asylum, to name a few—but Sam did trust the Doctor. He couldn't explain why, exactly, but he did. So he nodded and asked why.

"I think something happened on your last leap that brought us together on this one, and I need to know what that is."

"Al would know," Sam volunteered. "Ziggy keeps a record of both the original history and how it is now, so that the staff at Project Quantum Leap knows what we've been doing—and the politicians."

The Doctor grimaced. "Politicians. Yes, I know the feeling. I was Lord President once…." His voice trailed off and he laughed. "Not a very good one. I was never around. Too busy running away from responsibility. But that's beside the point. Would Al tell you and, more importantly, me, what happened on your last leap? In detail, I mean, not just what you told me."

Sam hesitated. "I've already compromised the Project's security, but he'd probably still use it as an excuse not to say anything. And he's right. I shouldn't have told you. But you're another leaper, so I'd only be telling you things you already know. The names might be different, but the principles are the same." He bit his lip, wondering if now might be the time to ask the question that had been on the tip of his tongue all night.

The Doctor had access to newer technology than he did and seemed to have overcome some of the problems that Sam still faced. He couldn't tell how Swiss-cheesed the man's mind was, but the fact that everyone could see him in his own body, as opposed to being disguised by someone else's aura, was an improvement to some degree; he would not be facing the humiliation Sam felt when he leaped into an awkward situation. Making himself accepted may be more difficult, but it would be an acquired talent. The Doctor had certainly mastered it; he walked around like he owned the place.

"Does the retrieval system work correctly for you?" Sam finally asked. He had grown accustomed to leaping, and if offered the chance, he wasn't sure that he would return home immediately—he knew how much good he was doing. But more than anything, he wanted the choice. He wanted a chance to see everyone back at Project Quantum Leap, again.

That first time had been brief, and his memories of it were fleeting, broken recollections at best. He had not even been entirely himself, a thing he had long since reasoned was the cause of the dreamlike quality of the leap that made it seem more imagined than the rest. He was sure that he would return to leaping as he had before, if granted the chance for a brief reprieve back at the Project, but he would feel so much more freedom if he could return home to embrace those whom he had left behind and see firsthand the good he was doing. He knew, perhaps better than anyone else, that a small act of kindness would spread. He himself may not be able to trace the effects of his work, but he knew he had touched people and that they would reach out to touch others, rippling the effect outwards.

But Sam was disappointed. The Doctor looked quizzically at him. "What's that?"

Perhaps he did not remember. Was it a comfort? Sam forced himself to rephrase his question, saying, "Do you get to return home?"

The look on the Doctor's face answered Sam's question for him. A heavy sigh pushed weariness and troubles aside, returning the leaper's face to its usual youthful, energetic look, although it still seemed forced and pained. The response itself was filled with exaggerated light-heartedness. "Nah, but I don't want to go home, do I? Too many other things to do, places to go, people to see. No sense of adventure if I go home; I know what it's like. I'd rather explore and see the universe for what it really is." He put the graphs down and blew out a breath. "If Al won't tell me, then you'll have to, Sam, if you're willing. But you'll need to trust me."

"I do trust you," Sam said, "but as much as I may want to, I can't help you."

"Come here." The Doctor stood up, looking utterly serious. "Now, I can assure you that I don't do this often, and only when it's absolutely necessary, but I need to know for sure. If I'm right, and I'm nearly always right, I don't want to bait them."

"Bait who?" Sam asked, not moving from where he stood.

"The Anipalaxians."

"Who?"

"The Anipalaxians," the Doctor repeated. "They could have scavenged the technology for this, but if they did, it wouldn't be very accurate—which is perhaps why they latched on to you. But if it is them, they're looking for me. If they know you aren't me, you aren't in any danger. They're quite amiable to strangers. Generally a friendly bunch, actually. But I can explain later; I need to know if I'm right." He paused, then walked toward Sam and stood in front of him. "This won't hurt, but if there's anything you don't want me to see, just imagine a door and close it. I'll be as quick as I can. I wouldn't do this if I didn't think I needed to, and even when I do, I don't tend to poke around where I'm not wanted." And before Sam could protest, the Doctor lightly touched Sam's temples and closed his eyes.

Sam couldn't describe the sensation if he wanted to; there were no words for it. Any number of thoughts crossed the forefront of his mind at first, and then they became more specific. After a moment or two—or was it an hour or two?—Sam realized the Doctor was talking and focussed on his words.

"Seen a lot, haven't you? And, oh, here it is. Self-illuminated elliptical orb, roughly fifteen metres on the long axis and ten on the short, hovering ten to twenty metres above the ground. I'd put it at about seventeen metres, myself, give or take fifteen inches or so. Ooh, and they're a bit showy with the lights, aren't they? Those aren't really necessary. That's the second appearance, then, while you were there? And they tried to take you, but you leapt out. Well, they would've been friendly with Ol' Max Stoddard; they wouldn't have a quarrel with him. Did you see any detail on the ship?"

It continued on, but Sam couldn't say for how long. He tore himself further away from the flood and stumbled on, trying to find his footing. And then, just as suddenly, he was hit by a new flood of emotions. Clear, precise pictures flitted across his vision. A classroom, students dressed in smart uniforms. It was a physics classroom, as announced by the letters scrawled across the board, but not his own. The students were bright, one in particular, but this was only an impression; as clear as everything was, Sam could not comprehend anything spoken, as if he were living in a dream and the conversation drifted away the minute he awoke. He was suddenly fearful of going any further, though he couldn't explain why. He still felt an innate curiosity.

A split second later, Sam was jolted back to reality. He could not recall, for a moment, precisely what had happened. Like a dream, he was only left with impressions. He risked a glance at the Doctor. The man was muttering to himself, already marking things down on paper, but he seemed to have felt Sam's eyes on his back. He looked up and offered a smile. "I had a feeling you'd try to wander. I'm more careful these days about the memories I'll push to the surface when I do that. I can't close everything off, but I can choose the less alarming ones to be glimpsed by the more curious ones like yourself. I thought you might feel at home in a physics classroom, seeing as you're not simply playing the role of a physics teacher.

"But, yes, Anipalaxians. They'll have trailed you here. See these odd little blurps? There _is_ a pattern to them; thick of me not to realize it immediately. It's a bit of background radiation, more or less. The energy given off isn't constant, but it is consistent. If you scale the time down to femtoseconds, and then look at the amount of energy released, you'll see it's equal to the amount of energy drawn in precisely nine-point-three-oh-four femtoseconds after it was released. Then, if you correlate that to the energy conversion within the next hour—fifty-four-point-three-one-nine minutes, actually, if it's averaged—you would see that you can predict the time of the next conversion, and through that next conversion, the next release and intake of the energy, allowing you to track them, because the traces would still be weaker the further away the ship is; the radiation, for lack of a better word, would be dispersed.

"The Anipalaxians are an efficient species, one of the best this side of the Medusa Cascade, but to see all their careful work destroyed must have—" The Doctor broke off. "But they didn't have that technology; they would have had to reverse manufacture scraps of material to even begin implementing that sort, let alone use it to propel themselves this far. I'm surprised they aren't tearing the Vortex to shreds; it's bound to be unstable—they wouldn't have been able to uncover the right formulas, not yet, anyway, and the energy signature shows a weakness in the conversion rate. But they wouldn't have reason to even…. Unless they felt their neutrality was violated…."

Sam's mind rarely failed him, the Swiss-cheesed effect aside, but it was a struggle to recover from the first strange experience and then follow everything that came out of the Doctor's mouth. He did recall his last leap, now, better than before; the memory had been dragged to the surface of his mind. The 'how' he was still at odds about; even his meeting with—what was her name? Taylyn? Tamlyn? Talyn?—that astonishing psychic woman, whoever she was, had not prepared him for that, not even the surprise that she had seen him as he really was. But the recent memory reminded him of his earnest desire to prove to the world that aliens truly did exist. Yet that was all it was to him—a desire to prove their existence. The Doctor had not suspected their existence; he had suspected their involvement. It stood to reason, then, that he had encountered something before, like Sam had on his previous leap. The fact that the Doctor knew the race of aliens simply by studying the outward workings of their ship….

First things first. Mathematics, physics. Concrete laws with which Sam was familiar and felt sure in defending. "You're still talking about your graphs as if they're real." He decided not to argue the scale regarding time just yet.

"Well, they are real," the Doctor answered, not looking up. "Just because you don't have the technology, doesn't mean I don't. I thought you lot were supposed to be an open-minded bunch."

"But you can't measure energy just as energy," Sam protested. "Not when taking into account conversion. Even if it were possible, you wouldn't have a useful graph. Energy is constant."

"Nuclear reactions," was the only answer Sam received.

"But that's not—"

"Energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared, correct? Therefore energy and matter are different forms of the same thing—they can be converted back and forth. If energy is converted to matter, or matter converted to energy, and I am simply measuring the generic energy conversions in its form of heat, light, kinetic, potential, what have you, then I can end up with a feasibly useful graph, and it has proven useful because, as I already said, if I scale back the time of the energy conversions, I can find the pattern and use it to track the Anipalaxians."

It wasn't worth arguing. Sam had a feeling that, even though he knew he was right and that he had years of science behind him, he couldn't win. The Doctor would, likely as not, twist his words. "These…Aniplaxans?"

"Anipalaxians."

"These Anipalaxians of yours. Who are they?"

"Anipalaxian _is_ who they are. You're human. You occupy Sol 3, or Earth. An Anipalaxian inhabited Palaxia Minor, formerly Anipalax 5 under the United Palaxian Agreement, which was dissolved when the Unipalaxians revolted by claiming illegally allocated resources within the system. But generally the Palaxians were peaceful, the Anipalaxians most of all. They remained neutral in the majority of the wars, like your Switzerland.

"But the Palaxian planets were…. They were robbed of their resources during the War. They became ruined, but not desolate. They were still inhabitable, at least until the end came. The backlash tore apart thousands of planets, but it would have been millions otherwise. If…. There would have been no life left there, or even here, or anywhere else for that matter, save one race. It had to be done. I didn't stop to think what had happened once it was over. It was over, and they were gone. That's all that I could think about." Sam had the distinct feeling the Doctor was talking about a different 'they' than the Anipalaxians or the other race he'd talked about but neglected to name, but felt the story was interesting enough not to interrupt.

After a long pause, the Doctor continued. "The Anipalaxians would have demanded compensation, I expect, and if they'd filed a complaint with the Shadow Proclamation, it probably would have been approved. But even if they didn't do it the official way, they've come for it, demanding it from the only one they feel should pay." He sighed. "It should have just been added on top of the other charges; list's bound to be ten times longer than I am now."

Sam laughed. The Doctor had had practice, he could tell. Sam himself could spin a tale well enough, and Al was quite good, particularly after he'd had a couple, if Sam recalled correctly, but neither measured up to the Doctor. He'd even managed to keep a straight face through to the end, and Sam had to admit that he'd nearly believed the Doctor, if only for a moment. He had been privileged enough to glimpse an extraterrestrial spaceship in his last leap—even Al would admit it now—but the idea of being able to name them was laughable. The story, with its history and its emotion, had seemed so real, but ending it on the note of humour allowed Sam to realize exactly what the Doctor was saying. First the graphs, then the Anipalaxians—the man was an experienced joker.

And yet even as he concluded this, Sam began questioning himself. The Doctor's ideas were bizarre, but they were complex, and while they didn't sound practiced, exactly, he delivered his spiels with confidence. This, coupled with the off-the-cuff spontaneity of the speech, made Sam rethink his initial reaction. He wasn't sure how the Doctor had pulled the fragmented memory of his last leap to the surface of his mind, and a small part of him was almost afraid of asking. The Doctor had never denied being a leaper, but he certainly had not admitted it.

"Oh, I've been so thick!" The exclamation brought Sam back to reality. The Doctor had a wild look in his eyes again, and he looked as if he'd been pulling at his hair with both hands. When he removed them, his hair stayed in its newest messy position. "That's why your Ziggy said history changed with that first real conversation of ours! It led to this! Now that I've figured it out, I should be able to prevent it from happening. The Anipalaxians would've just been looking for disturbances in the Time Vortex, but without the proper calibration, they latched on to the wrong traveller—you. They would have picked up Max Stoddard, thinking they had me, because they thought you were me. You escaped them, but they were able to tail you here. You were brought here because, in your so-called original history, the innocent Bill Rivers was murdered in my name."

"That's not right," Sam interjected. "You took the bullet for him; you would have died instead."

The Doctor was shaking his head. "They might have recorded that, but if luck was on my side, and usually it is, I would have survived that, one way or another. It's not the first time I've been faced with a gun. Bloody painful, being shot, but it's the anaesthetic that kills you. But, that's neither here nor there. Point is, that's not what initially happened, if you read between the lines. The intended victim was Bill Rivers, was it not? You leapt into Bill Rivers. That's why he was marked as the victim. But me, that still wouldn't have drawn me into the equation, but I'm here, aren't I? So why am I here? Because Bill Rivers was never supposed to be marked as a victim, and you were never supposed to be here to mark him as that victim."

"That doesn't make any sense," Sam protested, but he had the distinct feeling the Doctor wasn't listening to him.

"I wasn't intending to come here, you know, but the TARDIS is a temperamental old girl; she set herself on course and no amount of persuasion could dissuade her. Must be losing my touch; I can usually talk my way out of anything. But then she presented me with these facts. Facts and figures, lovely facts and figures, can't be changed except by one little tweak, and then—_wham_!" The Doctor's sudden exclamation and accompanying hand motions caused Sam to jump, and the Doctor seemed to make an effort to restrain his excitement as he continued. "'What was' shifted to 'what can be' to become 'what is', splintering off into multitudes of dimensions. And I could feel every one of them. I don't know how I missed it, really. Then again, Torchwood. They were at it for months while I was away."

"I beg your pardon?"

This time the Doctor seemed to notice Sam again. "You leap into different situations to fix things, right? And what happens to the original history, as you call it? It changes. It gets shoved into a parallel world. There's billions upon billions of them out there, stacked up against each other. You can't travel to them, not any more, at least not if everything's stable, but you can create one. And you do. You do it every time you leap, change something, and leap again. Splintering, shifting…. Fortunately most of these things are in flux, because you'd be stuck if you found yourself trying to change a fixed point. You can't change fixed points, even if it means sacrifice." The Doctor stopped.

After a moment of silence, Sam encouraged him to continue. The theory was captivating to the quantum physicist. Even if it was an elaborate story, a thing Sam wanted to believe but was strongly beginning to doubt, it was simply astounding. To Sam's disappointment, however, the Doctor ceased his explanation of dimensions and alternate realities, although his reference to shifting had called to mind the word used in a similar way when he had talked about the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

The Doctor resumed the thread of his initial explanation: why he was there. "I'm here to do what I always do—nudge history back onto its intended course. I'm the only one to do it because I am, unintentionally, the one who set it off on the wrong course. Well, not directly. Well…." He shook his head. "Point is, the Anipalaxians are after me, and I'm here to confront them, thereby saving both you and Mr. Rivers. History did not intend for you to die here in my name, and the TARDIS, bless her, knew that, so she took me here. I'm changing history and fulfilling it at the same time."

"But then why am I here, if not to save you?" Sam asked. "I always leap for a reason, so something needs to be fixed."

"You've told me what I needed to know," the Doctor offered. "In that sense, you've saved me. It would've been nasty getting pounced on unexpectedly. I always like to know what I'm dealing with."

Sam shook his head. "That's not reason enough. Normally, Ziggy would have a projection by now, but…." It was his turn to shrug. "The original history's in flux now, I suppose because of you, and she can't get any data. If I don't do whatever I'm intended to, I'm never going to leap out of here. I was supposed to save you, but now those circumstances have changed and, if you're to be believed, that's not even going to happen. If you stop it, you won't need saving, and I'll be stuck. Besides, if information was enough, I would have leaped already."

"I suppose you're right," the Doctor mused. "Well, then, you'll just have to wing it, like me!"

Like him. Was Sam like him? The Doctor had admitted to being a time traveller, and Sam had only seen that as possible if the man were a leaper, but Sam was collecting evidence that this was not so, unless their projects were radically different. Al had protested the point, but chances were he believed that was the explanation as well. The Doctor had spoken of a TARDIS, which Sam assumed was the equivalent to Ziggy at first, but Ziggy did not send Sam through time—she merely tracked him and helped him along the way. The Doctor's TARDIS appeared to be the vehicle, so to speak, that sent him on his travels.

"Who are you?" Sam finally asked, repeating an earlier question.

The Doctor looked at him quizzically. "The Doctor, of course. I explained that to you."

"But you haven't explained anything," Sam argued. "Al's right; you either evade every question I put to you or you spout nonsense. You haven't confirmed or denied anything. You've let me make my own assumptions, but you've never corrected me."

"I'd correct you if you tried to act on an incorrect assumption," the Doctor reasoned. "There, then. No harm done!"

Sam cut him off before he could change the subject—again. "You said you were a time traveller, but you never admitted that you were a leaper. You asked me to explain my theory of time travel. Now kindly explain yours."

The Doctor hesitated, reaching to rub the back of his head. "Well," he said finally, "not to bore you with the details—"

"I'd happily hear them," Sam said truthfully. He tried to keep the excitement from his tone; if he got carried away, the Doctor would take them off on some tangent as he had before, and Sam would forget his original question.

"Well, you wouldn't understand them, not really." The Doctor held up a hand to cut off Sam's objections. "My technology is more advanced than yours. You've realized that and accepted it."

"The United States can't be that far behind Britain," Sam reasoned, "and I'm going to be leaping for a while, likely as not, so a cursory explanation shouldn't endanger the future by giving me knowledge I'm not supposed to have. I'm in no position to use it. I could relay things to Al, yes, if I intended to betray your trust, but you don't have to tell me everything. I explained the basics to you, so you can explain the basics to me."

The Doctor still seemed reluctant. "There's just one teensy little problem," he said at length. Sam waited, but the Doctor did not elaborate, so he asked the Doctor to explain it. Again, the man took his time in answering. He did not launch into an explanation, which is what Sam had almost expected, but rather remained as ambiguous as before. "You don't have all the pieces to the puzzle. Neither do I, for that matter. But without them, you can't see the whole picture."

"And—?"

"You leap within your own lifetime, yes?"

"Of course," Sam answered, wondering why the Doctor was stressing points they'd already discussed, albeit not at length.

"I don't." The questions threatened to burst forth, but Sam contained them as the Doctor continued, "Your theory works—you're proof of that—but it also restricts you. You can't get around those restrictions, and frankly I'm glad, because I'd have a lot more work ahead of me if you lot were capable of _that_. I am rather impressed that you managed to test your hypothesis in the first place and that you could take care of most of the variables. Missing an important one would have killed you in an instant, tearing you apart immediately—if you were lucky.

"From what I understand," the Doctor said carefully, "you don't pass directly through the Time Vortex; you merely hitch a ride, nicking just the tiniest bit of it, enough to register a disturbance, but the process alone is taxing on your body. Time travel without a capsule is horrible; I speak from experience. The only reason your body is intact when you aren't fully submerging yourself and releasing yourself to Time's raging storm is because you managed to combine your vortex-nicking machine—ingeniously, I might add—with a primitive matter teleportation device. You're taking a risk every time you leap that you won't be assembled exactly as you were before, which may be why you experience that melding of personalities with those you displace."

"I didn't tell you about that," Sam said, astounded.

The Doctor shrugged. "Surface thoughts. I don't tend to pay that much attention to them, but that one was interesting. _Any_way, my point is, you are restricted within a set time period, and I am not. Unless you say that I can travel freely because, by the very act of doing so and appearing in a particular time period, I am making that time part of one I pass through in my own lifetime, then you cannot apply your principle to me.

"Yours is a linear restriction, a result of that linear concept of time that you all have, where you try to shove it into days and hours and minutes and seconds and years to be catalogued and counted off and whatnot. You restrict it, so when you try to pass through it, you restrict yourself by your own misconception, and you can only leap within your linear lifetime. Travelling within your own past is a safeguard. You know where you've been, and the things you've learned in the future can help. But while you can theoretically leap into your own future, you are endangering yourself. It would be a blind leap for you; you would have no knowledge of the world around you, no idea of the precise variables that went into creating it as it exactly was.

"The problem with future travelling when simply nicking the Vortex is that you are more likely to end up in a parallel world. Yes, I know, I'd said travel between them is more or less impossible. In truth, it is, and what you are doing isn't precisely travelling between them. The thing about the futuristic parallel worlds is that they keep shifting, squeezing each other out of the way. If you leapt into the future now, you'd leap into the most probable one that you'd later experience. If circumstances changed that, the future you'd seen would change. The worlds would shift, and that future would no longer exist in your world. You know better than anyone that events are not scripted in stone—well, except the fixed points. But for your purpose, the idea of leaping to fix what went wrong in the past, a future leap is pointless, since from your perspective, it has yet to happen." The Doctor paused. "Well, that's how I understand it, considering what I've gleaned from you."

Sam was nodding, reasoning that many of the concepts and hypotheses were the same. The Doctor was clearly a genius, likely with the same photographic memory that Sam himself had made use of time and again. If the man had studied time and the physics surrounding it from an early age, and then experienced a project similar to Sam's, it stood to reason that he would have formed a concept of time that was not quite fathomable to anyone else. Sam repeatedly had the impression that the Doctor treated time as another element, invisible as air, steadfast as earth, fluid as water, and dangerous as fire. In some ways, it was hard to tell whether the man was astoundingly brilliant or simply mad. Sam smirked, knowing which option Al would choose. In his opinion, the Doctor had had a few loose screws from the beginning—and he hadn't even heard their latest conversation.

Sam hadn't noticed that the Doctor was talking again. "I'm not sure where the Anipalaxians are going to be hiding out while they're here. They wouldn't blend in; just because they have two arms and two legs and one head and no tail doesn't mean they could pass for human. They're not shape shifters or even as skilled in illusion as Carrionites." He frowned.

"How do you know all this?" Sam queried, still not entirely sure that he could believe the Doctor spoke from a wealth of knowledge as opposed to an overly vivid imagination.

"I've met them before," came the reply. "A long time ago. They won't recognize me, but I'll know them."

Sam debated asking if the Doctor meant that although he leapt—travelled—with his own body now, without a guise, that he had once adopted the aura of someone else, just as Sam himself did. It was a change of topic, however, and Sam wasn't sure he wanted to relinquish the other one quite yet. "Have you encountered many aliens, then?" He posed the question rather hesitantly, wondering if where—and when—the Doctor came from, the idea of aliens was accepted as a truth.

"Oh, loads of times," the Doctor answered. "More often than not, really. Travel with them quite frequently. You lot make such great companions."

Sam was astounded by how easily the Doctor spoke of aliens, and then he realized what the man had said. "I didn't mean foreigners," Sam said slowly, thinking that surely that was what the Doctor meant, "but extraterrestrials."

The Doctor looked up at him. "Oh, yeah, I know." It was spoken lightly. A grin spread across the man's face as he added, "Fascinating creatures, humans—ingenuity, emotion, creativity, the whole nine yards."

There was no doubt about it; the longer Sam spent with the Doctor, the odder the man appeared to be. Reasoning that finding out a bit of his background would be helpful to understanding the other man, Sam asked, "Where did you grow up? Where's your family?" The Doctor didn't answer. Wondering if the man had perhaps not heard him, Sam repeated his questions, albeit phrased a bit differently. When no answer was forthcoming, he said, "Do you remember?" It was possible the Doctor did not; Sam himself had forgotten his brother, Tom, for a time.

"I spent some time with my granddaughter in London," was the response at last. "We lived there for a time."

"Your granddaughter?" Sam was truly surprised. "She must have been very young. Where did you live?"

Another hesitation, then a shrug. "76 Totter's Lane."

Sam tried not to grin at the victory. He had an address. Ziggy could run that, and then perhaps they would be able to find some information on the Doctor. "How long were you there for?" he asked casually, hoping to find out a bit more.

"Long enough." It was a deliberately vague reply. "But if you're trying to get information out of me, you might as well be direct about it. I'm not going to tell you anything I don't want you to know. Well, I suppose I've let things slip once or twice. Well, a few times. Well, more often than not. But it's never anything useful, not on its own." The Doctor straightened up. "Right, then. Nothing more for me to do here now; it's not time for twenty questions." He started gathering the papers together. Sam moved to help, but the Doctor waved him off, mumbling something about orderly messes.

"I can meet you tomorrow," Sam suggested as the Doctor started folding like papers together and stuffing them into his pockets. "We can figure out how to deal with these Anipalaxians of yours."

"I just need to do a quick check to make sure they _are_ Anipalaxians," the Doctor said, shoving the last wad of papers into his pocket. How they all fit in there, Sam couldn't say; from the looks of it, the Doctor didn't even _have_ anything in his pockets. "You may have a photographic memory, Sam-I-Am, but you don't know what you're looking for. It looks like an Anipalaxian ship, but if it's just one that was scavenged by, say, the Byzilites, then it's a whole new ball game. Byzilites are a bit nastier—not your average after-dinner company sort, more in with the six impossible things before breakfast. They're a scavenging race, haunting battlegrounds, but most have them have been driven out. The survivors, as far as I know, are living just out of range of the crossfire between the Sontarans and the Rutans. One of the best places to be, if you're one of that sort. Those wars have gone on for millennia now."

There was a slight pause as the Doctor frowned. "The Kikilakqic are another possibility, actually. I haven't come across any as of yet. Friendly by reputation, true, but I've had some bad allergies in my time. There were some gases in the Praxis range that would've given me a particularly bad time, had I ever run into them, and parts of Kilyaric are rumoured to be positively polluted with them. Mind, I was prepared, just in case. Not that I admitted it to myself that I'd needed it, but I do think it fit, in a bit of a peculiar way. I just wouldn't have been me without that stick of celery, decorative or indicative of gas or otherwise." And before Sam could think to ask anything, the Doctor was out the door and halfway down the street.

Sam's first thought was to follow him. He couldn't tell how much of what the Doctor said was actually the truth, though the last bit seemed to be a bit of a stretch, and figuring out where he was going would explain a few things. The man had to live somewhere, after all, and if what he brought with him to the school was a taste of what floated around his home, however temporary it might be, the things inside it would be of great interest. But, like anyone else, he did deserve his privacy. And by the time Sam had finished debating his morals, the Doctor was long gone.

"Sam? Hello? Anyone home?"

"Al!" Sam jumped. "How long have you been here?"

"Long enough to see you daydreaming for at least five minutes. I wouldn't mind so much if I knew you were thinking about something _worth_ thinking about, like one of those secretaries at the school with her beautiful set of great, big—"

"Al!" Sam shook his head. "Does Ziggy have any information?"

"Well, we've been running all the data again, and she says that there's a 63.7 percent chance that you're here to save Dr. John Smith's life."

"What? I thought she said that history changed."

"It did…more or less. He's not shot when trying to save you this time. He just turns up dead, without a mark on him, a short distance from the train station. Clothes were in tatters, but he didn't have any new wounds. They never did an autopsy because the body disappeared the next morning, and it was never recovered."

"When was this?"

"Tonight. It's estimated that he was killed early in the morning of the tenth."

Sam glanced at the clock and groaned. "That doesn't give me much time, Al. I was just starting to figure him out. I got an address out of him—76 Totter's Lane. Have Ziggy run that, will you? I don't have a date, but he said he lived with his granddaughter, so it would be recent—for you. I've got to see if I can track him down." Sam grabbed his coat, then stopped and looked at Al, who was dutifully punching the address into the handlink. "Do you know where he's staying?"

Al shook his head. "We don't have very much information on him at all."

"Well, go to him and see where he is, and then come back and tell me. I can't waste time looking all over the place for him."

Al nodded, understanding, and called, "Gooshie, centre me on John," before punching the appropriate button on the handlink. Unlike he'd been expecting, however, there was no whirlwind as the holographic images around him rearranged themselves into a display of new surroundings. "Gooshie? What's going on?" Al frowned. "Whaddaya mean you can't get a lock on him? Search the entire country; heck, even search the entire century if you have to—just get me there!" Another pause. "Damn it, Gooshie! We've been feeding Ziggy all we can on this guy—how can she not have enough information for a lock?" A brief moment, then, "Well, try it anyway!" Angrily, Al punched the handlink again, and this time his surroundings dissolved into a whirl of colour.

* * *

A/N First off, a tip of the hat to Rebecca, my first reviewer. Now, on to defending myself. For one, I know in the DW episode _The Girl in the Fireplace_, it was said that the Doctor walked among Reinette's memories. Well, I'm pretending it's different for everyone, or at least different for a genius whose mind has been Swiss-cheesed from leaping around in time. With QL, I honestly cannot remember which episode it was that mentioned the sort of things that Sam can recall about his leaps, so I took literary liberties with that. Secondly, I haven't read any QL _or_ DW books, so if anything I put down contradicts them, please overlook it. If it _really _irks you, you can tell me, and I'll consider changing it, providing if I can make it work. And if anything doesn't make sense (at least by the end of the story), meaning I've missed something, or anything along those lines, I'll be happy to fix it if someone informs me, because chances are, I won't notice myself. As for any random references I stick in this story, such as to Dr. Seuss or Alice in Wonderland, kindly note that it is merely a reference and that the works belong to their respective creators.


	5. Chapter 5

The swirling images hardly stopped before they would start again. Al grew dizzy, but he was able to catch a glimpse of the dates each time. January 1, 1955…January 5, 1955… June 16, 1958…June 20, 1958…June 1, 1962…June 5, 1962…May 21, 1966…May 24, 1966. He had to look at the handlink a second time as the holograms around him settled into position. May 24, 1966? That was Sam's last leap—the day he'd leapt out. The place was the same, too—Charlemont, Massachusetts. Tentatively, Al looked up to see his surroundings.

It was night, but it was by no means dark. Bright lights from—Al could hardly believe it—the spaceship, the same spaceship he had seen not too long ago with Sam, lit the woods. He wasn't in the clearing, but he was close to it, and he could see Sam stepping towards its centre, facing the bright lights. His back was to Al. Al knew that he was there, too, but, being a hologram, he couldn't see himself—the Imaging Chamber only showed him the surroundings others saw. He couldn't hear himself, either, though he wasn't sure if he'd been talking then. Probably not. He was as dumbstruck now as he had been then, if not more so. What was he doing back here?

He could hear Sam calling out to the aliens. His voice betrayed his joy. Tim and John Stoddard, Max's grandson and son, and the two government nozzles, Meadows and Hardy, were there, too. Al remembered their faces, though he couldn't see them now. They had been every bit as amazed as he, if not more so.

Glancing around him, Al saw that John Smith was there, too. He hadn't noticed the man before, but now it begged the question as to how he came to be there. He, too, was staring up at the spaceship, but he didn't appear particularly amazed. He was squinting a bit against the bright lights, muttering to himself. He pulled something out of his pocket and held it up, pointing it towards the ship. The silver thing he held buzzed a bit, and the blue tip lit up. Smith nodded and slipped it back into his pocket. He appeared relieved. Al turned back to the first scene and saw that Sam—and Max Stoddard—had just vanished. The ship, with its brilliant lights, followed a second later, vanishing in the blink of an eye.

The sudden darkness was a bit disconcerting. Al watched as Tim turned to his father, beaming, saying, "That was amazing, Dad. Pop was right all along. Do you think we'll see him again?"

John was speechless, it appeared. He could only nod. Hardy and Meadows weren't in a much better state. Meadows appeared even more disbelieving than Hardy, and Al smirked, wondering how they'd ever write up this report. A sudden movement to his left startled him, however, and he looked back at Smith. The others had noticed something, too, and came to investigate.

"Who are you?" John asked, the first of the three older men to recover from the shock.

Smith stopped in his tracks. "Oh, hello there." He grinned easily. "I'm Doctor John Smith."

"What are you doing here?" It was Hardy this time, probably worried about a security leak.

"Well…." Smith fished in his breast pocket and pulled out a thin wallet. Flipping it open, he said, "Does this explain it?"

Hardy and Meadows snapped to attention while John and Tim frowned. "So sorry, sir," Meadows said. "You're out of uniform. We didn't realize…."

"Oh, no matter." Smith waved it off, closing the wallet and stuffing it back into his pocket. Al, who had moved to glimpse it, was startled that he couldn't quite make out what it said—it looked as if the words were only partially there, indistinct as an image obscured by smoke. "Not here on official business, not really. Just a bit curious about that." He motioned skyward. "Amazing things, aren't they? Even I don't get to see one every day. I did see it a few days ago, twenty-first I believe, but tonight was the night I really needed to see it. Glad I made it."

"Have you studied this sort of thing long?" It was John, and he looked sceptical. Al couldn't blame him; he didn't trust Smith, either, especially now. The whole thing was just too weird.

"Oh, a long time, but you can never learn it all, can you? Learn more every day. That's the beauty of it—the universe is a great big place." He glanced up at the stars. "Some of those have burnt out now, you know, but the distance is so great that we're still looking at the starlight from here. Sometimes actions have effects long after the doer is gone, and often only a privileged few take the time to notice. But if those few spread the action—one good turn deserves another, as they say—then the effects will last long after the original action is forgotten." He grinned and the serious tone was gone, although Al had a strange feeling that Smith was, inexplicably, speaking to him, praising their work at Project Quantum Leap. "Like this coat. Janis Joplin gave me this coat, you know, and it's helped me a number of times. The how might not be very clear, but it has, trust me. Very distinctive, this. And it has pockets. Very handy."

Tim started at the name. Janis Joplin had been one name on a list Sam had had the young man memorize, Al recalled. The others didn't catch the reference. It did, however, draw their attention away from their questioning of Smith, Al noticed. Smith was able to carry on with his own little speech. "But this'll be it for tonight. Ol' Max'll be back soon enough for you, all too soon for him, and then Charlemont won't be getting quite the attention it has before. My fault, I'm afraid, but don't expect them to be back as regularly as they have been. Nothing will be drawing them here anymore." So softly that he surely meant it for only his ears, Al heard Smith mutter, "And if my aim was better, nothing would have drawn them here before, but I knew I had to come or they wouldn't have locked on to Sam, and the last thing I need on my hands is another paradox."

Al had to admit that if Smith was just another leaper, then the man had access to technology that was far more advanced than theirs. Considering that it was nearly the turn of the century—the turn of the millennium, actually—that was unheard of. Everything at Project Quantum Leap was cutting edge. It was difficult to say how far in the future Smith came from, then.

Al had a bit of an idea of what was being developed in the US; his security clearance was among the highest, after all, and if anyone happened to invent anything that they might be able to use to bring Sam back, he would be among the first to hear about it. With security being what it was, however, he had no idea what kind of secret projects were being developed across the pond. How quickly England could come up with a similar project, and be able to nearly perfect it, was impossible to say. Smith looked to be younger than Sam, but maybe he wasn't. A healthy, older man in good physical condition could look half his age. Plenty of women could, too; Al knew that from experience, having met a number of them.

The handlink bleeped. Al looked at it and sighed. The address Sam had given him hadn't turned anything up. The place had been a scrapyard in the early '60s and apparently hadn't changed much over the years, even if it wasn't actively used anymore. Ziggy couldn't find any development plans for the area, so it was more likely that Smith had slipped Sam a wrong address than the fact that Smith came from a time far enough into the future that the area currently occupied by the junkyard was used for housing. It was unfortunate. They didn't really have any hard data at all on this John Smith, let alone one who vaguely matched his description and was a practicing physician or even held a doctorate.

The endless secrets made Al nervous. They had left behind enough traces of the Project in the past as it was; prime examples were the handlink that had been left behind when Sam and Al had leapt together, causing them to swap places, and, more recently, Sam's recorded confession while under the influence of sodium pentothal. Why Sam had now blurted the secrets of the Project to a complete stranger, albeit a persuasive one, was beyond Al. The potential damage to the Project's security was worrisome enough, even if Sam hadn't been recorded this time.

Smith was talking amiably to the two government nozzles, Al noted, while Tim and John made their excuses to leave. They would probably have enough of a tale to tell Eva about her father-in-law's sudden disappearance without the inclusion of the odd appearance of Smith.

Al was vaguely curious as to how John would even tell his wife what had happened without sounding as crazy as his father, particularly when he had just tried to put Max in an institution for making the same claims, but Al knew he couldn't follow them. If he went anywhere, he should go back to Sam, but he couldn't exactly tell him that Smith was three years in the past on the date of Sam's last leap. He was supposed to find out where Smith was in the present so that Sam could save him and prevent his death. Besides, Al was afraid that if he left now, Ziggy wouldn't be able to get another lock on him. This last attempt had taken long enough, and he still felt dizzy.

"I'd like to hear this recording you have of Max," Smith was saying. "You say he appeared to believe he was an entirely different person?"

"Everything he told us indicated that, yes," agreed Hardy. Their formality had slipped during the discussion.

"Yeah, but he also told us he was born in '53," Meadows put in, scoffing. "He definitely wasn't thirteen years old, and even he didn't look like he could be a hundred and thirteen."

"Oh, I don't judge people simply on appearances," Smith said. "Quite misleading, those. I mean, look at me, you'd never guess how old I am, would you?" Without waiting for an answer, he continued, "I think it would be best if I took this tape off your hands for further investigation."

Meadows objected first. "We cannot allow you to do anything without the proper authorization—"

"Do you doubt my credentials?" Smith demanded. Al knew that tone. Smith was a force to be reckoned with.

Meadows realized that, too, but wasn't quite ready to give up the fight. "No, sir, certainly not, but—"

"Then we have no problem."

"It would require a number of forms to release our evidence into your hands, sir," Hardy said carefully. "If you would care to wait and simply—"

"I am rather busy," Smith cut in, frowning. "You haven't written up an official report yet, have you? Simply include the fact that you have released the recording to me under my orders, and I assure you that your superiors will not question it. If they do, they can expect a visit from me. I can assure you, Major Meadows, that I am just as qualified as Dr. Hardy here to examine the contents of the recording, if not more so. Dr. Hardy, I am sure that you would agree with that?"

As the man sputtered an affirmative response, Al realized he couldn't recall either Meadows or Hardy introducing themselves. He reasoned that his mind had wandered for quite a while, so he had likely missed that. Now, he listened as Smith outtalked Hardy and Meadows and convinced them to hand over the recording they had of Sam. If they had stopped to think about it, Al figured, they would have thought it ludicrous. Smith belonged to an entirely different military, if he was indeed part of it. Though it seemed absurd to Al, the two appeared to believe that Smith held a high-ranking position within their own military. Al could only wish again that he had been able to read exactly what Smith's so-called credentials were.

Less than twenty minutes later, Smith left Hardy and Meadows at the Charlemont State Hospital, the recording tucked neatly under his arm. Al, personally, hoped Smith would destroy it, but he doubted he had such luck. Even if the man leaped with his own body, the chances that he could take the recording anywhere were slim. Most likely, he simply wanted to listen to it. He had, after all, gotten Sam to completely spill the beans about the Project, but he had kept his own personal details, name aside, secret. If Smith was trying to gain information about the Project and its inventor, the tape would be valuable to him.

Smith headed in the direction of the clearing, slipping the recording into his coat pocket before hopping the guardrail. Al tailed him, wondering if he would be able to see exactly how this guy leaped. Although it was much darker now, Smith seemed to know where he was going. To Al's surprise, he bypassed the clearing altogether. It was hardly more than a minute later that Al saw something completely out of place—an old police public call box. Perhaps it wasn't so old from the perspective of the time he was observing now, but it certainly didn't belong in the wooded area near Charlemont, Massachusetts, regardless of time period.

Smith, however, was not surprised; it had clearly been his destination. Al realized that Smith had fished a key from somewhere and was unlocking the box. He stepped inside, and immediately Al's surroundings began to fade. The hologram was struggling to hold, and it reminded him of the time he had visited Sam in the psychiatric hospital back in Havenwell, Pennsylvania. Sam hadn't been himself then, not after being administered what Al figured was an ungodly high voltage for electroshock therapy. They had nearly lost contact altogether, and the struggle to keep contact had almost blown a few circuits on Ziggy. But now, after scarcely ten seconds of being separated from Smith, the lock was failing. For whatever the reason, Ziggy couldn't keep a fix on him.

As Al had hoped, Gooshie was able to coax Ziggy into making another effort to lock on to the elusive man, telling her the malfunction had been on his part and not hers. Al doubted Ziggy believed him—Gooshie wasn't exactly the best liar—but, despite her insistences that flattery worked only on humans, Al figured that Ziggy did like to be praised. She was stubborn, but she was also egotistical, and that made her very determined. She allowed herself to review the information on Smith and evaluate the successes and failures of the last fix. Consequently, the Imaging Chamber hadn't remained blank white walls for long.

Smith was only a few blocks from the train station. He had some sort of machine in his hands. It looked homemade to Al, but it seemed to be effective. Smith was using it to track something, from the looks of it. It emitted a series of bleeps and had what was akin to a small satellite dish on top, pointing in the direction he was heading. He was running, and Al guessed that by the time Sam got there, Smith would already be at the station. Al had checked the schedule earlier; it was deserted this time of night. If Sam didn't get there in time, Smith would be facing the danger, whatever it was, alone.

"Gooshie, centre me on Sam," Al hollered, pushing a button on the handlink. When the images settled into place, he could see that Sam was pacing the room. When he turned around to see Al, he lost no time in demanding where he had been. "Never mind that now," Al said, waving off Sam's questions. "You need to get to the train station." He proceeded to rattle off directions as Sam hopped into Bill Rivers's truck and took off.

"What took you so long?" Sam demanded.

"Left here," Al said. "And it's not my fault. It took a while for us to get a lock on Smith—"

"The Doctor," Sam corrected. "He likes to be called the Doctor. He says John Smith isn't his real name."

Al rolled his eyes. "That might explain something, but anyway, the _Doctor_ turned up in 1966 on the last night you leaped out, Sam. I ended up about five feet from the clearing we were in. If you'd turned around that night, you would've seen me, but everyone was focussed on the spaceship. I still find that hard to believe. Do you know Ziggy says that the pattern ended that night? There's one more report, a week later, when Max Stoddard turned up, and then nothing. You're turning right up ahead here."

"The Doctor had said something about checking to see if his first guess was right," Sam muttered, more to himself than to Al. He slowed, albeit marginally, to make the turn and then sped up again. They weren't far from the station now. "The Doctor thinks he knows what these aliens are. He says they're tracking him, but they found me instead. He says he has to confront them and fix things."

"Is that why he calls himself the Doctor, then? Because he fixes things?" Al knew he was in an ill humour, but he was worried. Ziggy may have finally made a projection, but Sam was just heading into danger now. If he failed, or if he was hurt, or if….

No. He'd succeed. He'd fix things. He always did, somehow, even if it wasn't what they expected. Sam had a knack for it; no matter what situation he got himself into, he could find a way to crawl out of it. Al just had to keep telling himself that. Things wouldn't be different this time; they couldn't be. Just because John Smith—the Doctor, as Sam apparently insisted on calling the man—was here, it didn't change things. Even if history was in flux, as Ziggy had repeatedly told them from the beginning, things seemed to be set now. Sam had a task. He knew what he had to do to leap. He could do it. He would. And then they'd be out of this mess. It could simply become another recorded file in Ziggy's vast memory banks.

"I never asked," Sam admitted. He took the last turn into the station, parked, and looked at Al. "Which way?" he asked seriously, ready to do whatever needed to be done.

Al consulted the handlink. "We're in the right place. It should be somewhere around here." Like Sam, he looked out at the deserted station, but neither could spot anything.

"The Doctor's here, though, isn't he? You're certain?"

Al double-checked with Ziggy and, after a bout of squawks, gave Sam the confirmation. "He was heading in this direction when I locked on to him. He was going 13.8 miles per hour when Ziggy first got a fix on him, though he slowed to 5.4 miles per hour when consulting some machine he had. I'm not entirely sure what it was, and we didn't have time to rig Ziggy to scan it. It looked like a tracker or a compass of some sort, but he was following it here, near as I can tell."

Sam nodded. "Right." He glanced at Al one last time. "Feed whatever you can into Ziggy to see if you can get a more accurate projection, and try to turn up whatever information you can to help me out here." He smiled. "Like you always do." Before Al could respond, even to wish him luck or to make some sort of sarcastic remark, Sam was out of the vehicle and headed towards to the tracks.

Al sighed, wishing he had a cigar. Even if he didn't have it lit, having it was simply comforting. He'd never admit it to Sam—not yet, anyway—but he was worried. He didn't like seeing his best friend take all the risks while he stood by and watched, unable to offer anything but moral support. Sam appreciated it, he was sure, but Al figured he, too, sometimes wished that his best friend wasn't simply a hologram. Al didn't know how much help he could be now, but two pairs of eyes were better than one. He hit a button on the handlink and appeared on the other side of the rails, searching for anything out of the ordinary.

XXXXXX

Sam heard the Doctor before he spotted him, roughly thirty yards up the tracks, initially hidden from view by a length of empty boxcars. The wind had carried snatches of the man's voice to him, but the speech became clearer as he neared. "…stroyed. All of it, wiping out every single being in the universe, except for—"

"We did not come to hear your excuses, Doctor."

Sam nearly jumped out of his skin when he heard the voice. It was low-pitched with little variation in tone, at least to Sam's inferior ears. It took him a while to locate the source of the voice, but when he spotted it, he could hardly believe he had missed it.

What he had mistaken for elaborate graffiti was in fact two separate figures, roughly eight feet in height, one on either side of the Doctor. The heads were somewhat elongated, with two large eyes protruding slightly in the front of a flattened face. The nose was merely a small protrusion from the centre of the face, hardly noticeable, while the mouth was shaped like an ordinary human's. The straggly hair, devoid of colour in the dark night, grew only from the head and would likely have covered the creatures' ears. The neck was perhaps a foot in length, and Sam was surprised to see telltale slits for gills. The skin did not appear abnormally scaly, but the fingers and toes—all six of them—were webbed, though not the point that they would not be useful on land. They were adapted to land and sea, Sam realized; they were equipped with both gills and lungs, to name a simple adaption.

As a scientist, he hungered to know about temperature regulation, feeding habits, growth cycles, the effects of osmosis—everything he possibly could—but he lost some of his zeal when he realized that they were sentient creatures from a far more advanced society than his own. On top of that, they were threatening, even if they did not appear so with their slight bodies. He wondered about the effects of gravity and the sort of atmosphere to which they were adapted, but he tried to focus on the problem at hand. He had to keep analyzing the situation to learn what he could before he dared to act.

The Doctor had taken his time in replying, and Sam, having gathered his own thoughts, could detect the weariness in the man's voice. "There is no excuse for destroying neutral territory," he began carefully, "but the circumstances of war are unpredictable. Even with the best of intentions, it could not be helped. Palaxia Minor was too close to the—"

"You continue to make excuses. Tell us, what was gained by the Time Lords? Did they accomplish their goal?"

"The Daleks were destroyed," the Doctor answered swiftly. He hesitated, looking contrite. "Well, there was a bit of trouble recently, and Davros turned up again. I…well, the other…. It was genocide."

"And you can guarantee that no Dalek survives?"

The Doctor shook his head. "There's always a chance there were survivors."

"Like the sole survivor of the Time Lords."

Sam could tell that the Doctor was shaken. He himself didn't understand the conversation; he couldn't even pretend to understand, regardless of what little the Doctor had rattled off to him earlier. But he understood feelings, and he knew when someone needed support. He stepped up to stand beside the Doctor, swallowing his trepidation. He had seen Al goggling at the aliens before and was comforted when his holographic friend joined him. It gave him the courage to say what he felt he needed to say. "Are you trying to lay the blame of a war on this man's shoulders?" he asked boldly, managing to keep his voice from shaking. "No one can bear sole responsibility for—"

He had not prepared a speech, but he was not even allowed to finish his thought. The creature on Sam's left cut him off. "You, what do you call yourself, a human? You know nothing of what we are discussing. The Doctor is no ordinary man. He led the Time Lords into battle and destroyed his own people while unsuccessfully trying to defeat an ancient enemy. The legends say he goes around saving planets, but he has destroyed many more. He bears the responsibility for the destruction of our home planet as well as his own. He is wanted for countless crimes, but he always runs. He will not face his responsibilities, nor the penalties for his numerous offences. He is a coward, but we will have him face the consequences of his actions."

"Sam, I think we may be in a little over our heads this time," Al said nervously, looking as if he wanted to back away or simply leave the Imaging Chamber altogether. To his credit, he did neither, but Sam suspected he felt useless. They would be far outside the original history now, or at least that of which was actually recorded.

"They're right," the Doctor said slowly. He looked broken. "I don't deny it. Even with the best of intentions, there is always sacrifice, whether it's one life, twenty thousand, or an entire world." He took a deep breath and turned to face the Anipalaxians again, drawing on an inner strength. "But if you merely wanted compensation for your loss, without causing war, then you should have appealed to the Shadow Proclamation, citing Article 589, Paragraph 23, Clause 12. If they won't hear you, the best I can do is promise to find you and your people an empty, habitable planet and take you there. I don't know how far I'd have to take you, but I would find a place for you to live in peace. I promise."

"It's an honest offer," Sam put in, knowing from the sincerity on the Doctor's face as he had made it that his own statement was true. "Rebuilding is never easy, but it is always an option. Things aren't static; nothing stays the same forever. You can look on this as a chance to improve, to grow, to learn. It's not an opportunity to spurn before consideration."

The answer came swiftly, and Sam imagined that had it been spoken by a human, it would have been a scathing reply. "And yet it is nothing. Did you not wish to die, Doctor, as you watched your planet burn? Did you not see your thirteen lives as a curse when you realized you would spend the last of them utterly alone? Only a handful of Anipalaxians survived, Doctor. The innocent fell at your hand, murdered in the senselessness of war. You offer us a second chance. That chance is yours, not ours. You wish to give it to assuage your conscience. You wish us to give you a second chance, but you have had it. You've regenerated at least once since we last saw you, since we last heard of you on the frontlines of the Battle of Arcadia. Did you spend your time rebuilding what you had destroyed? No. You ran."

The Doctor appeared to be in great pain. It was an emotional struggle, but one of an unimaginable magnitude. Al watched quietly, finally saying, "War scars people in different ways. You can bury it, but you can never forget it. It can smoulder, sparking bitterness or hate or self-pity. Our Anipalaxian friends over there are blinded by negative emotions. But others, like the Doctor, seem to blame themselves for something that was out of their control, even if they had a part in it. Some people relive it. Others suppress it. Coping mechanisms can work for a time, but even the worst things need to be faced sooner or later."

Sam looked from the Anipalaxians to the Doctor and back again. He knew the end result, at least in the original history, so he knew where this was leading. "You'd be willing to murder him to feel the satisfaction of compensation? He told me the Anipalaxians were peaceful. He almost praised you for it; at the very least, he admired that! And now you let your accusations tear him apart before you finish him off, like cats playing with a mouse?" He was disgusted and did not try to hide it. "Look at yourselves! Are you any better than you think he is if you do that? He's given you an alternative option. Two of them. Do you find it too belittling to even consider them?"

Beside him, the Doctor seemed to rouse from his internal struggle a bit. He managed a quick smile. "Poor choice, belittle. You can have a field day with that word." Although Sam didn't quite understand how, he was glad that the Doctor was using it as a foothold to pull himself together. "Sam's right, you know—oh, this is Sam Beckett, by the way, didn't I introduce you? He's the one you chased from 1966. Brilliant human mind; he'd be a genius if I wasn't here for comparison.

"See, I reckon he's been through the wringer a few times. You lot haven't ever tried time travel without a capsule; in fact, I'd say that before you tried cobbling together that technology you scavenged, you hadn't tried it, period. No need to; you'd had everything you needed in the here and now. But Sam here, he's never tried it _with_ a capsule. A bit primitive at first, until you consider that he doesn't even know all the fundamentals.

"But the lore around the Time Lords includes a few choice stories about Reapers, doesn't it? When things go wrong? When the unwary time traveller sets history down a course it was never meant to go? Could you tell me, honestly now, that if you continued using this technology that you'd never meet them? Particularly when you have to repair it yourself or rely on others with the same limited knowledge that you possess? Sam can. See, here on Earth, they have a saying: 'Out of the mouths of babes'. No need to get into its religious origins, but the point is that the innocent are oftentimes the ones most capable of seeing and speaking the truth.

"Now, I ask you, if you pause to consider the wisdom he's spoken in the last ten minutes, is it beneath you? Are you so angry, so scarred, so scared, that you only see one option? Because if you do, then I will have to stop you, because whatever you intend to do to me, it will surely have repercussions on this town and this time and I will not—cannot—stand for it."

It was a tense moment. Sam wasn't sure what else he could do. Al simply stood by, not ranting or raving as he normally might. The Doctor stood firm, holding his ground, facing down the two creatures that towered over him. He was stronger than before; he had defeated and overcome his inner turmoil, at least for the moment. As Sam looked at him, at the control in his face, he wondered why he had not guessed more quickly that the Doctor was an alien; perhaps it was because he wanted so much to know that he was not alone in leaping and that there were others who had perfected similar projects since it meant that his, too, would eventually be perfected.

At any rate, the Doctor certainly did not seem human now. He was as otherworldly as the two Anipalaxians. As for the Anipalaxians themselves, they remained still, and there was no visible form of communication between the two offending aliens. They received and returned the Doctor's stare tenfold. Had the wind not continued its baleful howl, everything would have been utterly still and silent.

"If you are unwilling, then we have only one option." The figure to the right spoke now, while before the one on the left had been the sole speaker. The speaker's arm stretched out, its hand clutching some sort of device, and the Doctor adjusted his stance, wary.

But Sam realized, almost before the Doctor, what was about to happen. Perhaps it was an instinct after leaping so long, but he knew that this was what he was meant to prevent. He jumped in front of the Doctor, pushing him to the ground as there was a brilliant flash of light. Al, who was watching with wide eyes, wouldn't have been able to say what device the Anipalaxians used, but he noticed its effect immediately. Sam had taken the full impact of whatever it was, and he wasn't moving.

The Doctor had been startled, but after a quick glance at Sam, he was on his feet in a flash. "I warned you," he snarled at the Anipalaxians. "I did not want any harm to come to anyone or anything here. I don't give second chances, not any more. Leave this planet now and I won't hunt you down, but if you harm a single being here or anywhere else in your anger, then I will find you. Leave this place!"

Had Al been focussed on the Anipalaxians instead of on Sam, he would have noticed the flicker of fear in their otherwise emotionless eyes. The two aliens vanished, teleporting away, and the Doctor turned back. He knelt down beside Sam, lifting what were now the tattered remains of a coat and shirt away from a wound on the left side of his torso. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

Al was frustrated; he couldn't even shake his friend, though he knew he shouldn't even if he could when there was no telling what exactly had happened, in case Sam had any internal injuries. He'd gotten _that_ particular lecture often enough, back in the days when he and Sam had worked on the Starbright Project—they'd discussed everything from First Aid scenarios to building a better mouse trap. "Can't you do anything?" he demanded, even though he knew he wouldn't be heard. "You're a doctor, aren't you? What's wrong? What did they do to him?"

The Doctor looked up at Al, and Al suddenly realized that, with everything that had gone on, the nonsense the Doctor had spewed earlier about being able to see and hear him if he tried probably wasn't nonsense. The Doctor's next words confirmed that, and for the first time, Al was relieved. "I'd need to confirm it, but considering that they were after me, I'd say he's been poisoned—a large dose of acetylsalicylic acid."

"Aspirin?" Al would have been sceptical if he wasn't so worried.

"Well, it would be relatively easy to replicate. Bad enough for you lot, even the mild cases, but this much may have affected my regeneration cycle." He pulled out some sort of silver rod thing, moved it up and down Sam's body to scan him, and nodded, seemingly satisfied with the noise it was making because he didn't give it a second glance as he pocketed it. Al belatedly realized that it was the same thing the Doctor had used earlier, back in 1966.

"Positively lethal for me, that," the Doctor continued. "I would have needed more than a bit of luck to survive that one. To put it simply, Sam's in a coma, but since I'm here, we'll be able to keep him from going into cardiopulmonary arrest. I don't fancy checking him into a hospital; I'll have to take him to the TARDIS." He looked back up at Al, having finished his cursory examination of Sam. "No visiting, I'm afraid. I don't think your technology is up to accessing beyond five dimensions yet, is it?"

Al couldn't think to answer, but when the Doctor moved to pick Sam up, he found his tongue and protested. "No, wait, what are you doing?"

"I just told you," the Doctor replied. "I'll make sure Sam's safe, even if I do have to check him into a hospital—though I was sure I'd left the infirmary on the first floor for easy access, although I expect it's been moved around a bit now. Funny thing, I'm never injured and somewhere where I can actually make use of that room. I hope it hasn't been shunted to the sixteenth floor again; that'll be a bit of a run, even if the TARDIS can meet me halfway." He was muttering to himself again.

"But you can help him, right? You are a doctor?"

"Hm? Oh, yes, of course." The Doctor shifted Sam so that his head was supported and at such an angle that he would be in little danger of choking on his tongue. "Dabbled in a bit of everything. Human medicine was essential, seeing as I take you lot on for companions half the time."

Al wanted to continue questioning, but even in his panicked state, he realized that the Doctor was preoccupied. He didn't want to leave, but he felt helpless staying, too. And he knew the Doctor must know something about medicine; after all, he was right about the toxic overdose. Al had not been prepared to trust the Doctor, but when his words were backed by Ziggy, he had no choice. A scan had assessed Sam's vitals, calculating the likelihood of an overdose. Ziggy had not been completely wrong yet, and Al's trust in her didn't waver—even if she did occasionally make a few erroneous predictions, information always seemed to turn up to correct it in time.

But leaving Sam there, in the hands of an alien, friendly or not, was one of the hardest things Al had ever done.

A/N I just wanted to take the time to thank my reviewers, Rebecca and Catty, for giving me a bit of feedback on this story. I'm always open to advice, suggestions (whether or not I take them), constructive criticism (really, if something's horrific, I would like to know how I can start to fix it), and so on, and hey, if I'm told something's good, I'll know for the future. And as for the dates at the start, I did a rough calculation of that formula mentioned in QL, but they did specifically mention New Year's in the episode, and it doesn't fit the formula (providing I did it correctly), so I'm going to go with the fact that the Doctor is notorious for his bad aim and that he was just a couple of months off. As far as anything remotely related to medicine that turns up in this story goes, I either made it up or scrounged things up on the internet, so no one should be expecting anything I write to be reliable (at least in terms of that).


	6. Chapter 6

"No, no, don't move yet," a voice cautioned. Sam tried to open his eyes but shut them quickly against the stinging light. If he was that sensitive, then the voice must be right—moving was still out of the question.

"What happened?"

"You did what I expect you came here to do," was the reply. "But you can't leave until I've patched you up; if you'd leapt into your next host like this, you wouldn't be any help to anyone." A pause. "Pulse is up again, steady, settling at about seventy. Good. That's normal. Breathing rate…good. Blood pressure…hold a tic, there, just getting it…."

Sam lay patiently through the rest of the examination before he was allowed to move about and sit up. The lights were dimmed slightly, making it easier to look around the room, and he could have sworn they grew brighter as his eyes adjusted. He was in a plain white room, spacious and yet packed full of all kinds of instruments. He recognized some of them, but others were, he supposed, advanced technology. He looked back at the Doctor who was staring at him critically.

"They were rogue Anipalaxians, it turns out," the Doctor began, still eying Sam as if gauging his reaction. "That's why there were only two of them. It's uncommon to find them in fewer than groups of ten. That's what he'd been referring to, that first one, when he'd said there was only a handful or so of survivors. I expect he'd been thrown out of his band as a dissenter or that he was the last of his own alive and couldn't be accepted into another. Poor example of the life out in the universe, really. It's just as well that they had a focussed goal; I'd hate to think what they would have done if they had taken their anger out on anyone they happened to pass by.

"Still, lucky for me, and for you, that the female didn't know the proper use of the spyrigalimeter, though I expect she had a better idea than the male. They're not meant to be used at any distance, you see. Still would have worked, though. It would have had me out cold in a healing coma for at least the rest of the night if it didn't kill me altogether. I probably would have spent the week in the Zero Room if I'd made it back to the TARDIS. Well, I probably would have if I still had it, but I think I jettisoned it a while back and haven't gotten around to finding a replacement. I don't _think_ I've got a spare hidden away somewhere. I really should get one; who knows when it might come in handy? Though the TARDIS may have taken the initiative by herself…. I ought to see. Even if she has, she's sometimes stubborn about telling me these things.

"You're in the TARDIS now, by the way," the Doctor added. "In my infirmary. I didn't bother redecorating it when I did the rest of the desktop theme; some people find it more comforting this way, associating white with sterility. Not that the TARDIS would allow anything in here to become contaminated; she cares for me, and for anyone else I bring aboard, too much to risk further damage via infection in the event of an injury. But you, Sam, have just recovered, in record time, I may add—though if you consider where we are now, you may say I cheated a bit—from what could have been a very nasty case of acetylsalicylic acid poisoning. You won't have any lasting effects now, nor will your host, and by the way, I can guarantee you he will remember none of this, and I expect you won't, either."

Now was not the time to ask for clarification, Sam figured. It was best to focus on simple things first. "What day is it?" he asked cautiously.

"Outside the main doors, it's the bright, chipper morning of May 10, 1969. In here…." The Doctor shrugged. "I tend to lose track. Suffice to say, it's been more than a few days since the last night you remember clearly." He paused. "I felt it, you know. The splintering. I'm not usually at the heart of the crack; generally I'm trying to fill it. There were still so many directions that night could have taken, even after your sacrifice. I just had to nudge it along the right path. But I'm grateful, Sam. I think we're more alike than you ever imagined."

"What makes you say that?" Sam, though touched by the Doctor's sincerity, could not contain his curiosity.

"Whatever has you leaping is the same as what keeps me travelling," the Doctor said quietly. "And we both encounter more than our fair share of trouble, from the looks of it, and do our best to put things right."

Sam was silent for a moment, thinking. He didn't know much about the Doctor, not if he laid out in front of him all the facts—and possible figments—that he had gleaned during their time together. But despite that, they did seem to share a certain similarity. Still, there was one thing that bothered Sam, and he couldn't help but voice it. "The Anipalaxians. The war that destroyed their territory—"

"The Last Great Time War." The Doctor's voice was bland, monotone, and yet somehow accepting of the inevitable questioning.

"It destroyed your people as well? The Time Lords?"

"The Time Lords, the Daleks, and far too many others. I know some survived, but I don't know how many." The voice was hollow, so Sam was surprised when it volunteered more information. "It was my idea. I pitted the Time Lords against the Daleks, reasoning that even if we weren't stronger than them, we were equal in strength. We could defeat them if we sacrificed ourselves doing it. We nearly succeeded."

"But you survived."

"I was born again into the aftermath of the war, in anger, in sorrow, in despair. I tried to cover it up with humour. I tried forgetting it, wearing myself out so I wouldn't have to think of it. But every waking moment it was there. I thought, later, that I'd waited too long to take a travelling companion with me. Having one changed me so much, for the better. When I faced the Daleks again, I tried to do so alone, when I realized there was no hope for me. I was ready to sacrifice myself, but Rose…. She wouldn't allow it. She came back for me, but she nearly killed herself saving me. I had to sacrifice myself to save her."

There was a lengthy pause, and Sam wasn't sure if the Doctor would continue, but eventually he did. "Something went wrong with the regeneration. It wasn't nearly so bad as my eighth; one of your doctors nearly killed me, punching a hole through my second heart and dousing me with anaesthetic. Well, technically, she _did_ kill me. Woke up in the morgue, completely clueless, toe tag and everything. Nearly didn't regenerate after that one, and when I did, I had to absorb some human DNA and _that_ nearly killed me all over again. Funny thing, that. I was essentially half-human for that regeneration, even though a human-Time Lord metacrisis is fatal." Any trace of liveliness in the tone died at the end of that statement.

But Sam had learned more about the Doctor in the last two minutes than he had in the last two days. "First a healing coma, then at least two hearts, and now you're telling me the Anipalaxians weren't exaggerating when they said thirteen lives?"

"Twelve regenerations," confirmed the Doctor. "And it is two hearts, yes. I don't know how you humans can stand it with only one." The Doctor sighed. "I don't expect you to understand my physiology, Sam. I can tell you that the differences don't end there, but it doesn't matter."

There was an edge to his tone and Sam bit back his next question. He couldn't ask if the Doctor felt he was alone now that he was the last of his kind. He was prepared to argue that the Doctor wasn't; that, based on the roles he played, he had a large family—everyone he touched became part of his family. But that simply made Sam wonder how many people _did_ know of him. It wasn't likely to be in the news or any such thing that one man—or Time Lord—could save the world if he tried. Somehow, Sam had no doubt that the Doctor _had_ saved the world, probably many times over.

"You mentioned travelling companions," Sam began carefully. "Where are they now?"

From the look on the Doctor's face, Sam guessed it had not been the right question to ask at the moment, but he still received an answer. "Most of them are leading their own lives now."

Even though the reply was devoid of detail, Sam did not ask for a further explanation. He didn't need one. Fishing around for something to say, he then asked, "So how long have you been travelling?"

The Doctor chuckled. "Lifetimes, Sam. Entire lifetimes. Some short, some long, but a lifetime all the same. And don't think I've been like this every time; I'm different. Well, I'm still the same, essentially. I remember everything I learned before, for instance. But there are those little personality quirks that can vary. Sometimes they skip a regeneration or two or five, and sometimes they never show up again, but that doesn't change the fact that I'm the Doctor and that I, like you, am usually somewhere to put right what's gone wrong. Well, unless I go somewhere just for fun, but, blimey, things do turn up where you least expect them." There was a pause. "Of course, time travel in itself will turn up unexpected things. Last time I ran into Queen Elizabeth, she was all set to behead me. Trouble is, I don't know why. I expect I'll run into her in the future. Well, my future."

Sam started. Sure, the Doctor had said he'd leapt—travelled—outside of his lifetime, but he'd really met—? But the Doctor, Sam firmly reminded himself, was an alien who called himself a Time Lord. It made sense that he wouldn't be restricted as easily as Sam might. Still, it begged the question as to how much of Earth's history the Doctor had had a part in. Sam put the question to the Doctor, truly curious, adding, "You asked me about my brushes with history—what about yours?"

"Recently?" The Doctor grinned. "I met Agatha Christie. Brilliant lady. Always had wondered what had happened to her when she disappeared for that bit and lost her memory. But if you're talking larger, world famous history, well…." The grin weakened slightly. "My companion, Donna, and I, we…." It faltered completely. "It was a fixed point; it couldn't be changed. I had to, but I couldn't, and Donna…. She helped me. After arguing with me for so long, when she finally understood, she helped me do it. But she was right; we had to save someone. Not everyone. Just someone."

The Doctor was quiet for a long time, and Sam wondered if he should ask exactly which world famous event the Doctor was referring to. Finally, however, the Doctor continued, quietly saying, "But the city of Pompeii choked and burned, just like it needed to, and twenty thousand people died. I hadn't wanted to stay, but Donna wouldn't leave. Still, I had never thought I'd be the one to force Vesuvius to erupt, even if she agreed. Pompeii or the world. A terrible choice, but there was only the one option, really."

Lifetimes, the Doctor had said. Sam could hardly believe that someone could keep going after being faced with those kinds of decisions. It was a wonder the Doctor's spirit wasn't broken. He was weighted down with responsibility, but he bore it well. Sam knew how difficult it could be to right a small wrong, but the guilt of ensuring that a terrible tragedy took place would be too great for one person to bear alone. Perhaps that was why the Doctor had mentioned how much he had depended on his companion, his friend. A shared load was always lighter.

He knew that to be true himself. He always had Al to confide in. No matter how troubling a leap could be, he always had someone to turn to. Of course, sometimes, like now, he confided in someone he met during his leap, regardless of how much Al disapproved. He'd confided in Tamlyn—yes, he was certain that that was her name; how he could forget, he didn't know—and…. He cursed his Swiss-cheesed memory. There was that mother and her little girl, when he'd leapt into the man who was holding them hostage….

The Doctor was talking again. Sam noted that he'd changed the subject. "…seems to have healed well enough. See, when a spyrigalimeter isn't properly handled, it's about as safe as a firearm in the hands of a child when the safety's off. They aren't used much anymore, for that reason, though they were quite popular at first simply because they were astoundingly efficient and accurate. An appropriate dosage can be calculated and administered in seconds by a trained professional."

The Doctor caught Sam's eye and grinned, launching into a more detailed explanation that he must know Sam would appreciate. "You might recall the light? The spryigalimeter was developed for use in the oceans of Anipalax 5, as it was named then, and the light was essential. There was research into studying its refraction, and it was found that the greater the angle of refraction from a single centre point, the more accurate and precise the measurement. It was used as a safety net, so to speak; if something went wrong, the possibility of an incorrect dosage could be ruled out. Plus, if the dosage _was_ incorrect, they'd be able to compensate for it immediately, minimizing the adverse effects."

There was a pause. "But things went downhill when a bit of a black market developed for them. Turns out that by recalibrating the main injection chamber and shorting out the secondary circuit to force the electron route through the tertiary channel, thereby disabling the underwater stabilizer, it can become a fine short-distance weapon. Accuracy's not always the greatest, particularly when you try to do what the female did and still use it for its original purpose, rerouted or not, but it can still pack a punch. An expert would learn the recoil pattern and become quite adept at using it, making it all the more dangerous. Shame, really. It was a great technological advancement for its time, but there was a vote to divert funding from those projects in favour of security. The Anipalaxians were terrified that something like that would happen again. They wouldn't risk it."

Sam's mind processed and catalogued the new information, eager as he was to learn whatever to could, but he stopped as he suddenly realized what the Doctor had first said. "Wait, what's healing well?"

The Doctor gestured to Sam's left side. Sam had noticed that his torso was bare before, but he had not realized why; from the looks of it, his skin had been badly burned. On closer inspection, though, Sam realized that the burn looked old, faded. "There was a minor explosion as the spryigalimeter fired. Bit difficult to restore those things for their original purpose, but harder still to keep some of the modifications. It's no wonder it failed. You got a bit more than just a blast of medication. I did think for a moment that I'd have to check you in to a real hospital, if only so Bill would have a story to match his supposed wounds—I'm assuming that your displaced hosts remember snatches of what you've done, hence Bill'd be expecting to be wounded?—but I'd have to pass it off as a gunshot and then explain how that happened, with more unanswerable questions once you actually leaped out and Bill Rivers turned out to be perfectly healthy.

"No problems, though. I've monitored the changes and done a few things, so you've nothing to worry about. It'll clear up in a day or so—might even be gone by the time you leap next, actually. Time works wonders on healing wounds, and after your next disassembly and reassembly of atoms, you'll probably be as good as new. Well, there's always a chance that you'll be put back together wrong, but you take that risk every time." Seeing the look on Sam's face, the Doctor hastily added, "It's a very small chance, almost inconsequential, really. Nothing to worry about."

It was not comforting to realize that the Doctor had assessed his ability to lie correctly; he wasn't very good at it. Perhaps, though, some of that was because Sam had enhanced his ability to tell when people were telling the truth. "Exactly _how_ small of a chance?"

"Well, if you consider how often time travel is attempted, the odds change considerably. Of course, if you have the right technology, or at least adequate technology that you can tweak a bit, things can change in your favour. A minor…" The Doctor trailed off, as if realizing that, this time, Sam didn't need all the details. "About one in 7983, give or take."

Great. He was more likely to completely destroy himself than win the lottery. Far more likely. As if the lottery…. Lottery. The lottery ticket. "Wait a minute," Sam looked up at the Doctor. "That lottery ticket. Both of them. Bill's and Jack's! They never bought lottery tickets. Bill didn't, and apparently Jack claimed it was slipped under his door—was that you?"

The Doctor looked sheepish. "Well, yes. I'd thought I'd teach physics again, but ol' Bill didn't take the bait. He regarded it as some sort of scam. So I chose history. Like I've told you, I'd taught that, too. But…. Just remembering the last time brought back some more memories that, sometimes, are best buried. At least for now." The Doctor took a breath before grinning at Sam. "Good thing Jack tried his luck; too many winning tickets in town would have been a bit suspicious, and I would've had to try another tactic."

"But…how did you—?"

The Doctor grinned again. "Without drastically changing history? I did a fair number of probability calculations, I'll tell you that. Haven't done those in, oh, must be some 800-odd years now."

Sam was startled. "You mean since you were 800 years in the past?"

The Doctor shook his head. "This is my tenth lifetime, Sam. I am a bit older than I look."

"And how old are you?"

"Well…." The Doctor hesitated. "I did say I was 904 a few years ago, but I might've tweaked the truth a bit."

Feeling he wouldn't get a clearer answer than that, possibly because the Doctor didn't know the answer himself, Sam let the subject drop. Almost. "So when you said you lived with your granddaughter…."

"Susan. Yes. I may have a photograph of us somewhere. Let me see." The Doctor quickly left the room. Sam had been looking forward to a chance to explore, but he had hardly taken ten tentative steps before the Doctor returned. He evidently knew where he kept his keepsakes.

Sam assumed the young woman in the black-and-white photograph was Susan, but he could hardly believe that the old man was the Doctor. "It was a bit risky having this taken," the Doctor said as Sam studied it, "but Susan insisted. We stole the negatives for it; I've got them here, somewhere. Or I did. I may have given them to her. She said she wanted something to remember me by. She never elaborated, even when I asked her. She liked to keep her secrets."

Sam, wanting to know more but not willing to pry, did not ask the Doctor if she, or anyone he knew, had managed to survive the war—or the destruction of their home planet, whatever it was. It was possible. If Susan had lived with the Doctor on Earth, maybe she hadn't been…. But no. If she had survived, wouldn't she still be here with her grandfather? Surely, even if they had had a family quarrel at some point, their mutual grief would have brought them back together? Even the Anipalaxians had said that the Doctor was the last of his race, and he had never denied it….

"I don't think you have long now, Sam," the Doctor said, taking the photograph back and tucking it away in his breast pocket. "You may even leap the minute you leave the TARDIS."

"But won't Bill notice something?" Sam asked. He never knew what it would be like for a leapee to suddenly be settled back in his or her original time, not even after the sideways leap he'd experienced once, and although he imagined it was as disorienting as suddenly finding himself in the middle of a potentially embarrassing situation, he was fairly sure Bill would notice a large spaceship.

"With the TARDIS?" The Doctor seemed to know what Sam was getting at. "Nah. Perception filter—he'll just ignore it. Of course, if I fixed the chameleon circuit, she might look like something besides a police box, but, well, I've grown rather fond of her. Besides, the last time I tried to fix it, things got a bit out of hand."

With all his experience from leaping, Sam knew better than to ask. He just accepted it. He could always question Al later, if he remembered. But right now he sensed that it was time to leave. "Thank you, Doctor. For everything."

The Doctor grinned. "Oh, no, thank you, Sam Beckett. You saved my life, and by doing that, who knows how many other people you've saved? You're a hero by your own right."

The Doctor scrounged up another shirt and jacket for Sam to wear—his own were beyond repair—and led him out of the TARDIS. It was a trip Sam hoped he would never forget. From the endless corridors to the high ceilings, to the warm coppery tones of the ship that made it seem almost alive to the eerie glow from the console in the main control room, it was truly amazing. It was alien. It was fascinating.

Seeing the outside was a bit underwhelming, but it was astounding all the same, and Sam had to admit he wouldn't have guessed an old police box could hold so many secrets inside of it. It did, however, explain the Doctor's earlier remark about things being bigger on the inside. "It's comforting to know the future will be better," Sam said softly. "As long as we keep fixing things, it can't get too bad."

The Doctor, instead of giving his usual grin, offered Sam a half-hearted smile. "Ah, but the problems never go away, do they? There're always more things to fix so more things can go wrong. It's a never-ending cycle. And we can't fix all of them, even if we try. Some things we simply have to prevent in the first place. But, remember. Without effort from others, none of your good actions would be any good. They might right a wrong for a time, but you may only bring temporary relief rather than an actual solution to the problem. There're always dissenters. Sometimes, you need to reason out why they're that way; it's not always by choice, not really."

The Doctor sighed. "I wish you good luck, Sam, since you're bound to encounter more than your fair share of bad luck, no matter how you try to avoid it. You may not be the sort of person to believe in luck; some days, I don't, either. But you're not going home, not yet. You've got some work ahead of you; I can see it. As I told Shakespeare when he was writing _Hamlet_, be true to yourself. It's the beginning of the path to get through troubled times."

Sam wasn't sure he was particularly pleased to let this be a parting note. He had come to trust the Doctor, strange as he was. He had found him to tell the truth, no matter how unbelievable it may seem. For him to be the harbinger of misfortune, however poorly cloaked, was not comforting. Besides, as much as he wanted to keep helping people, he wanted to be able to go home. He wanted to be able to control his leaps as the Doctor controlled—at least usually—where he travelled.

Sam opened his mouth to ask for an explanation, to say anything at all, really, in case he could get more information. He was still burning with a keen curiosity. But he never had a chance to voice any of the thoughts that flitted across his mind or waited impatiently on the tip of his tongue. Before he could say so much as a single word, he leaped, leaving behind one of the most unusual situations he had ever been in and unconsciously burying many of the memories of the last few days deep within the recesses of his mind.


	7. Chapter 7

A/N: Credit to the website Al's Place for explaining the gun produced in the QL episode _Killin' Time_.

* * *

By noon, Al knew it was going to be a very long day. Sam was still in between leaps, but that didn't mean life at the Project was any less frantic. If anything, it was more worrisome; they never knew when Sam would reappear or where, and they wouldn't admit to themselves that there was a chance that he _wouldn't_ reappear.

Ziggy was running continuous scans for Sam's brainwaves. Gooshie was monitoring her progress, reviewing Sam's last leap, and feeding her more information. Donna had finally taken some paid vacation, though she'd only agreed to one week. It had been years, and the stress was wearing on her, but she'd always insisted on being at the Project in case Sam returned. He had, once, but they weren't sure when it would happen again, and it was hard to see the hope in Donna's eyes every time Sam was caught in between.

Verbeena was off at some convention somewhere, ready to leave at a moment's notice when Sam settled into his next host. He, himself, was still writing reports. And Tina…. Al didn't know what Tina was doing. For some reason, she wasn't talking to him. He wasn't sure what he had done now. Even if she had been listening to gossip, he was sure there was nothing going around the lower ranks about him. It wasn't as if he'd had time recently to seek out an innocent one-night stand. Maybe he'd forgotten something?

Al shook his head. He couldn't figure out the mysteries of women, and even if he put Ziggy to the task, albeit secretly, he doubted he would be given an answer. Probably if she could figure something out, she would make up an excuse to withhold that information from him, and she'd bury it so deep that he would never find it himself. Gooshie might be able to, but he wouldn't dare ask, and Tina probably would be able to, but then she'd want to know what he was doing and what he was looking for, and he couldn't tell her that. He valued his life more than that.

"You have a visitor, Admiral."

Al jumped when he heard Ziggy's voice, then groaned as he realized what she'd said. Normally he would welcome a break from writing all the reports, but visitors tended to equate to surprise inspections. He had barely made it through the last one and wasn't looking forward to putting on a show again. "Who is it, Ziggy?" Al asked, resigning himself to having to change into his uniform.

"Petty Officer Tanner reports that it is a highly ranked individual of the British government here to inspect the progress of our Project."

"What?" Al exclaimed. "Ziggy, we're a top secret project! They don't have access to us!"

"Petty Officer Tanner reports that the visitor has a letter of permission signed by the president."

"I don't care!" Al said, knowing he couldn't refuse but unwilling to give in without a fight. "How did he find out about us? It's not like we've allowed anyone to publish anything. And we don't give tours!"

"I do not know, Admiral, but Petty Officer Tanner has permitted our guest access to my main control room. I am cross-referencing his credentials as we speak, but I have not yet found a match. If we have an intruder, I will seal the base in accordance to the security protocols and he can be dealt with accordingly."

"Thanks, Ziggy," Al muttered. He hoped that Ziggy wouldn't have to go into lockdown. The paperwork after the last one had taken him a month, and from then on they were supposed to have weekly drills. That, as far as Al was concerned, was ludicrous. Sure, they'd changed their strategy since Leon Stiles had escaped their facility—and pulled a gun from an M.P. who was now on permanent desk duty. But even with the extra security, they couldn't eliminate the element of risk, and someone higher up in the food chain than them had decided drills would prepare them. What wasn't considered, Al figured, was that they could never prepare for anything. They tried, yes, but they didn't know who would be sent here next any more than they knew where Sam would turn up or even where he was in between leaps.

Al figured he'd better get out to deal with the visitor as soon as possible. He would be welcoming and friendly, sure, and stop just short of showing whoever it was to the door. By the time he'd struggled into his crisp white uniform, though, he was afraid someone—namely Gooshie—may have let something slip. The man was great, really, but he _was_ easily intimidated. Then again, there was no telling how Tina would react. Al rather hoped she was in no mood to get back at him by plying for the visitor's attentions. She was good with words—and a number of other things that never required such needless filler—when she needed to be, so she should be able to get around answering questions without saying anything important. If she was focussed.

Al headed to the Control Room, determined to appear professional in every way possible. He was not about to let the British government get something up on the American one, whether or not the visit was certified. Even so, he had hoped Gooshie wouldn't be quite so talkative. Judging by what he could hear of the conversation when he came in, it was entirely one-sided.

"So you see," Gooshie was saying, "we can access any past leap and track the changes that Dr. Beckett has made. We rarely notice that anything has ever changed, and it is always a surprise to review the files. Dr. Beckett designed the parallel hybrid computer and conceived the idea for Project Quantum Leap itself. We call her Ziggy. She's the one who has allowed you temporary access to the security system."

"Well, then, Ziggy ol' girl, I guess I have you to thank, do I?"

Al froze. He was hearing things, surely. He entered the room and caught a glimpse of a long brown coat and spiky brown hair leaning over Ziggy's controls. The man—or whatever he was—didn't notice Al come in, but Ziggy didn't waste any time in introducing him. "Rear Admiral Albert Calavicci, welcome. This is Dr. John Smith."

The Doctor turned around and grinned. "Oh, hello, Al. Wonderful place you've got here. And—oh, look at that!" He moved over to one of Ziggy's control panels. "This is Sam's last leap, correct?" He looked up at Gooshie and received a nod of confirmation. He studied it for a moment, typing in a few things and accessing various files, much to Al's dismay, and then stepped back, grinning widely. "Oh, you are kidding me! That's brilliant! It's absolutely brilliant! Look at that!"

Almost without pause, the Doctor continued, returning to flicking through various pages and saying, "You've got a record of everything Al witnessed via the handlink. Funny bit right at the start here, looks like a half-beat delay, written and spoken.… Oh, that'll be the TARDIS's translation circuits. She was close enough to pick it up for you, then, even considering that you weren't technically there. Might've sounded a bit echoey until she adjusted; you would've had to glance at things twice, too. But look at this! You've got the conditions right down to the atmospheric pressure and millisecond, from the looks of it." There was a fleeting frown. "Dialogue, heat signatures, heart rate…" The Doctor looked back up at Ziggy. "All that's not really necessary, is it?"

"I monitor everything I can, Dr. Smith," came the smooth reply. "Every piece of information can be used to predict a more accurate scenario as to why Dr. Beckett leaped where and when he has."

"And what measures do you take against file corruption?"

"I am afraid you are not privy to such information, Dr. Smith."

"Oh, come on, Ziggy, you've surely cleared my credentials by now."

Al was fairly sure Ziggy had not, because he would have been informed, but he was also fairly sure that she wouldn't admit any such thing to the Doctor. "What brings you here, sir?" Al asked before Ziggy could answer, gritting his teeth, determined to play along.

"Oh, no need to call me by my title," the Doctor waved an arm, not really paying attention to Al. "I just had a bit of unfinished business here."

"Here?" It was Tina. "May I ask, Dr. Smith, what business you could possibly have here when you have not visited us before?"

"Well, maybe I haven't visited _you_, per se, but I have visited Al. Go on, ask him."

Great. Now it was up to him. He'd already been laughed at when he'd told stories about the aliens on Sam's leap to Charlemont. If he followed it by this one, they might want to have him committed. He'd tried to prove that he hadn't completely lost it by tracking down the recording, but they couldn't…. Al started at the realization. He'd seen the Doctor take it. _He_ had it! "You've got the recording!" Al blurted.

The Doctor grinned. "Yup," he said, popping the 'p'. "I do, and I figured I'd better return it. You wouldn't want it falling into the wrong hands." He somehow managed to produce the reel from his pocket—Al wasn't going to fathom how—and passed it over.

Al took it, marvelling that it was actually there. They didn't have top secret information floating around somewhere in the past, surviving to be used in the future…except for the handlink. But he didn't want to think about that right now. Tina was giving him a look that demanded explanation, and Gooshie looked perplexed. Sighing, Al explained, "He calls himself the Doctor. He's the John Smith Sam leaped in to save, but he's a time traveller, too. He's the reason Ziggy had so much trouble figuring this last leap out." Al waited a moment for his colleagues to absorb this information—they hadn't been privy to all the details before, being too occupied with researching, feeding information to Ziggy, and keeping her running smoothly—and then added, "But he's not a leaper, like Sam. He's an alien."

The Doctor grinned and waved. "But not from Mars. I had one friend who kept making that mistake, called me Martian long past the time she knew what I really was, but it actually did turn out to our benefit." He seemed to realize he was getting sceptical looks. "What, you don't believe me? More than that, don't you believe Al? You ought to, you know. He seems to be the honest type."

Tina coughed pointedly. "Look, Al, a joke's a joke. We've got work to do, so get your friend out of here."

"Oh, no, but I wanted to stay!" The Doctor protested, still grinning.

Gooshie looked horrified. "I should have realized…. I shouldn't've…. Ziggy, what is his clearance? How much did he see?"

"Dr. Smith has viewed much of the technical information regarding Dr. Beckett's last leap."

"And his clearance?" Al prompted.

Ziggy took her time in answering. "The data is inconclusive, Admiral."

"Ziggy…."

"There are repeated reports of a Dr. John Smith working with the Unified Intelligence Taskforce within the British Isles, but no such description matches that of the present Dr. Smith."

The Doctor whistled. "You found them. Good job. But I'll bet it would be a bit more difficult breaking into those reports. I had a much easier time tracking down the Anipalaxians, I'm sure." Catching Al's eye and ignoring the rest, he continued, "I informed the temporary leaders about the rogue duo we encountered and was assured that they would be punished. I plan to check on that. I trust the Anipalaxians to keep their word, of course, since they uphold their laws much better than you lot, but I'm sure the two we met will be in hiding, and I want them found."

Al chose to ignore that for now, instead continuing to question Ziggy. "And the identification he presented to Petty Officer Tanner—?"

"Appears authentic but in fact is an elaborate forgery," Ziggy confirmed. "There is no record of either government commissioning a visit to our facility. I should warn you, Admiral, that Dr. Smith has managed to infiltrate my systems and has covered his actions with a highly complex cloaking device. I have had to block certain files regarding Sam's last leap and they cannot be reopened."

Gooshie rushed over to Ziggy immediately, still berating himself for showing the Doctor everything. Tina glared at the Doctor, demanding what he had done. Al had similar concerns, but he decided to address the stubborn entity whose moods he had grown accustomed to rather than the enigmatic stranger. "What have you had to block, Ziggy?"

"Any information accumulated regarding Dr. Smith, the duration of the time you were centred on him in 1966, and the circumstances regarding Dr. Beckett's leap out."

Ziggy had no right to sound so cool and collected, Al figured. The Doctor had nearly wiped their last leap. "I'm going to have to report this," Al threatened. The Doctor was trying to look innocent, his hands hiding in his pockets.

"You can't involve the police," the Doctor responded with a shrug. "Code One clearance, isn't it? And you could try to hold me here and report it to your superiors and wait for a reply, but frankly I think that's too much of a bother. Takes far too long. And you ought to know from Sam's time leaping that I have to cover my tracks. What if I left traces behind in every place I visited? Blimey, you'd hardly have to turn the corner before something turned up. And you can't honestly say you were looking forward to reporting aliens two leaps in a row, were you? It'll be vampires next." There was a pause. "Well, no, not really, not yet." Another pause. "But you will be careful, won't you? For Sam's next leap?"

"Of course we'll be careful!" Tina snapped. "We're always careful. We prepare as best we can. We won't abandon Sam."

The Doctor held up his hands as if to calm her—or to ward off a possible coming blow. Tina was angry, Al knew, and since Ziggy had confirmed that the Doctor was here without permission, well…. He was glad he wasn't in the Doctor's place. "I didn't mean for it to come out that way," the Doctor said hastily. "I'd just like you to be extra careful. I know you dealt with some missing variables in this last leap, but I just think you should try to prepare for the possibility of similar future circumstances."

"Right, like we're going to meet another time travelling alien." Tina rolled her eyes. Al doubted she believed them, and frankly he didn't blame her.

"And you've infected the files," Gooshie added, looking up. "I can't get into them. We can't review Dr. Beckett's last leap now, not regarding anything to do with you, and you were connected to many of the missing variables."

The Doctor rubbed the back of his neck. "Well, that can't be helped." He hesitated for a moment before blurting, "Remember what I said about traces. Sam's left his traces, and an expert could piece together the puzzle, seeing the big picture even with a few missing pieces. The universe needs balance."

Al shook his head, not really understanding what the Doctor was talking about. "Look, don't think you're doing me any favours here. You're just causing us more trouble."

"I'm giving you the recording!" the Doctor protested.

"As a guise for practically wiping our records of Sam's last leap," Al countered. "That's probably why you got it in the first place. You're sneakier than my thir—no, fourth wife. _She_ would go…." Al trailed off, catching sight of Tina. "Never mind." He waved it off. "The point is, by intruding, you've initiated a lockdown. You can't get out any more than we can."

"Aw, that's not true, is it, Ziggy?" The Doctor rounded on the parallel hybrid computer for confirmation.

"I have already sealed off the main doors and the elevators to the subsequent floors. This has alerted officials in congress, and the Admiral can expect a visit demanding details in the morning."

"So you plan on keeping me here until then?" the Doctor asked.

"That is correct."

"Well…." The Doctor looked around uncertainly. "I tend to avoid government officials when I can. They tend to either want to lock me up or salute me, and I really don't know what's worse. And it _really_ wouldn't be good for me to catch the attention of the American government now. I mean, it's not until 2006 that Harriet Jones made that…ahem." The Doctor broke off. "Well, you might only have to wait until 2005, really. That's when things start to change. At least that you lot notice. You've missed it for millennia, really. Well, most of you. There are a few who _do_ notice. Granted, those are the ones who tend to be more troublesome for me…."

"If you have anything important to say before we lock you in the Waiting Room, you might as well get on with it."

It was almost comforting to Al to see Tina's anger directed at someone else. She tended to smoulder before actually exploding, but she did have a sharp tongue when she was testy. It had been directed at him not too long before, but the worst time was about this time last year, if he recalled correctly, when he'd forgotten her birthday…. Right. Her birthday. Thankfully, he'd prepared for this moment. There was a card in his desk, somewhere, and he'd get someone to order flowers and champagne, and he could pretend tonight, over dinner, that he'd merely been biding his time. And then, when they finally got to the horizontal tango, well….

"Where'd you put me if Sam wasn't still in transit?" the Doctor asked, sounding curious. "Surely you wouldn't put an intruder in with a visitor."

"There's always the broom closet," Tina snapped. "Al, you should have known this was going too far. And why today, of all days? Are you _trying_ to—?"

"Admiral," interrupted Ziggy, "Dr. Eleese has arrived back at Project Quantum Leap."

"What? It's only been two days!" Al exclaimed. "She was supposed to go for a week."

"We'll need to override the lockdown, then, to let her in," Tina stated swiftly. "Gooshie?"

"I'm working on it, Dr. Martinez," Gooshie answered. Tina rolled her eyes. He called her Tina when Al wasn't around; she supposed he simply wanted to be proper.

"Dr. Eleese is already nine levels down," Ziggy informed them in her superior tone of voice. Why she hadn't informed them earlier, Al couldn't say; the moods of the computer were a definite strike against her. "She has taken the stairs. I am sealing the doors behind her."

"Who's this Dr. Eleese, then?" the Doctor asked, forever curious.

"Sam's wife," Al replied, sighing. "And he doesn't even remember her. She's left here to worry about him. She's only seen him once since this whole mess began. She knows how he's doing and what he's up to, but that's no substitute for having him here." Al thought back to the time Sam had leaped into policeman Jake Rawlins in San Diego, California, and the time he had spent trying to convince Sam that he was there to stop his first wife, Beth, from giving up on him. It had been painful to see her there, but he had relished every moment he had, even if she didn't know he was there. He had desperately wished that he could touch her, hold her, kiss her, let her know he was there, that he was alive, but he'd been a helpless hologram. It wasn't the same as what Donna went through, but he did understand her pain to a certain degree. It was sometimes hard not to feel abandoned by the one you loved. "She was brave to let him go. She put her trust in the retrieval system. Sam had tried to fix it, but it didn't work."

"It broke my heart." Al looked over to see Dr. Donna Eleese standing in the doorway of the Control Room. He wanted to question her, to demand to know why she was back already, but he didn't have the heart. "It broke my heart," Donna repeated, "and the only thing that holds it together is hope. But I shouldn't need to tell you that. You've had your heart broken, too. You know what it feels like. I can see it in your eyes."

For a moment, Al thought she was talking about him, but she was looking at the Doctor. He was looking pained as well. "I'm so, so sorry, Dr. Eleese. I want to try to help. I want to make it safer for Sam. I'm the Doctor, by the way. Doctor John Smith."

Donna came over to shake his proffered hand. "Please, call me Donna. I didn't see a new car parked outside; how did you get here?"

"Oh, I have my ways," the Doctor said. Tina was staring at him as if appalled by the gall he had; he was completely ignoring the rest of them. Gooshie, however, seemed interested; Al suspected he had noticed no car was parked in the spaces reserved for their visitors and had been too polite to say anything. It was just as well; they didn't believe his story that the Doctor was an alien, but it would support the fact that the man was odd. Furthermore, without a car, they didn't have a license plate number to trace.

"And may I ask why you are here? I was not notified, and surely if this was a planned visit—"

"Oh, no, I just tend to drop into places from time to time." The Doctor waved it off. "But I am privileged enough to know about your Project, and I know the dangers that Sam Beckett faces, perhaps better than you yourself. I'd like to see if I can tweak things here a bit to make it safer, at least while Sam's in transit."

"Don't listen to him, Donna," Tina interjected. "This is all some wild prank of Al's. Dr. John Smith over there is pretending to be some time travelling alien that's posing as a government official. I have to admit that he has some good fake IDs, since he did make it through security, but he's a threat to the Project's security now. He's looked at Sam's last leap and practically destroyed our records. Ziggy's gone into lockdown—you must have noticed, she was closing everything behind you—and we're left to deal with _him_."

"So you can't help Sam." Donna didn't look angry; she looked sad. She'd gotten her hopes up, Al realized.

"I can do what I said if I'm allowed," the Doctor replied. "Look, I know it sounds absolutely barmy, but it's true. I _am_ an alien, and I _do_ travel through time and space, and I _did_ corrupt your records, but I had to. I was there on Sam's last leap, Donna, and the things you've got written down about me…." He shook his head. "I can't leave those kinds of traces."

"And I didn't plan this as a joke," Al interjected, decided it was safe to speak. "I didn't trust the Doctor in the beginning, I admit it. But Sam did. I never understood why, but he did, and I trust Sam's judgement."

"See? They won't even admit it." Tina crossed her arms. Her stern expression softened as she turned back to Donna. "But what are you doing back here? You've got another five days off."

"I had a feeling," Donna responded slowly. "I didn't want to ignore it. I've learned not to ignore that kind of feeling. I knew I had to come back here, so I did." She swallowed nervously. "Sam's not in trouble, is he?"

"He hasn't leaped into anyone yet," Al answered, "so you don't need to worry."

The Doctor opened his mouth to say something, but after a moment's hesitation, he closed it. Donna seemed to notice this, and she turned her attention back to him. "Look, I'll be honest. I don't know who you are, and I wouldn't trust you, but Al's right. If Sam trusts you, then I do, and if there's anything that you can do to help him, or at least make it safer for him while he's out there, I want you to do it."

"Dr. Eleese, perhaps it would be best to consider—"

Donna cut Gooshie off before he could finish his sentence. "Gooshie, if there's a chance that Dr. Smith can help Sam, I'm going to take it."

"But we can't trust him!" Tina insisted. "Donna, he's already cleaned our records of Sam's last leap. Doesn't that mean anything to you? There's no telling what else he'll do!"

"I'm willing to take that chance, Tina. If Al was the one leaping about in time and you were offered a chance to make it safer for him, even if it wouldn't bring him home, wouldn't you take it?"

Tina couldn't muster a reply to that. She wasn't ready to forgive Al, not yet, and they'd both had their flings on occasion, though she was regretting hers with Gooshie. She'd wanted to make Al jealous, but she didn't actually have feelings for Gooshie, and now she felt rotten as if she had been leading him on. He was considerate as ever, naturally, never mentioning it, but she knew he had Ziggy working on something to try to win her back. It wouldn't work, of course, but she was willing to let him try. Al had had more than his fair share of flings, after all, and plenty of _his_ weren't business-related or for the good of the Project, as many of hers were.

"Gooshie, if the Doctor's going to get within five feet of Ziggy, you're supervising." Al figured Gooshie was the best man for it; Tina was biased against the Doctor and Donna would probably be willing to turn a blind eye to some things if what he did actually worked, and heavens knew _he _wouldn't have a clue if the Doctor was helping or harming the Project. But Gooshie—there was a man he could trust to focus on the problem at hand.

"I'll have to look at your quantum accelerator, too," the Doctor added. "Might need to swap a few wires, reverse the polarity, that sort of thing. It'll depend."

Al raised an eyebrow. "On?"

"How you routed it through in the first place." The Doctor gave his characteristic grin. "Brilliant, really. Can't get over that. With all you're up to, I should be getting a pounding headache, but you're subtle about it. Noticeable enough if you're near the centre, of course, like I was at JFK's assassination, but it's camouflaged well otherwise. And you haven't produced any obvious side effects and kept going on regardless, which I have to admire. Generally, when dealing with primitive technology, you can easily identify blaring errors; half the time I wonder why people haven't destroyed themselves first. But not you. This is different. Not alien, either, I checked, and—"

"And I don't care what you're going on about or why you insist on playing this charade," Tina cut in, "but if you step a smidgen out of line, I swear you'll regret it. We've all invested too much in this project to see it torn apart by some…some…." Tina shook her head, unable to come up with the appropriate word.

"Tina, honey," Al said, putting his arm around her, "we know how you feel. We all feel that way. I'm not entirely happy with it, either, but Donna's right. I know what we've been saying is hard to believe, but it's true. It really is. The Doctor really does know what he's doing, even if he acts like he's missing a few screws half the time."

"Oi!" The Doctor looked affronted. "I'll have you know I'm a lot better than I was."

Al ignored the Doctor, turning to embrace Tina more fully. "And Tina," he added, "tonight, a certain birthday girl will be spending a romantic evening with me." Leaning closer to her, he continued, "And, if you're willing, I am envisioning an ending with us dancing a certain tango in our birthday suits."

"Oh, Al." Tina beamed at him and threw herself into the embrace which she had been reluctant to accept, kissing him fiercely. Breaking it, she said, "You did remember."

"Of course." Al reluctantly let go of Tina. Now was not the time; they had other tasks at hand. "Gooshie, make sure the Doctor doesn't blow us sky high, will you?"

"Naturally, Admiral," Gooshie replied, still looking a bit nervous.

"Oh, Ziggy?" Tina broke away from Al and looked up at the one thing that held the ends of the strings that tied Project Quantum Leap together. "Keep us updated on what Dr. Smith is actually doing. He may have been clever enough to fool you once, but—"

"I am well-versed on your idioms, Dr. Martinez. 'Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.' I will monitor the information Doctor John Smith accesses and ensure the safety of my systems."

It was enough to satisfy Tina. She slipped away with Al, leaving Gooshie alone with the Doctor and Donna. He was comfortable enough around Dr. Eleese, of course, but his skin still prickled when he thought about what Al had said about the Doctor. He doubted the truth of all the details, obviously, but there was still something distinctly unnerving about even the possibility. He hadn't finished his review of Sam's latest leap, not to the point where Sam finally completed his task, even, but what he had read convinced him that, had the Doctor been an ordinary 1969 man, he should have been committed. Seeing as he clearly did not belong in 1969, however, Gooshie was left to question what exactly was truth and what was fiction.

"I realize that you are intruding," Donna began once Tina was safely out of the room, "and that you caused us to go into lockdown, but we should still have access to the kitchen on this floor—is there anything I can get you?"

"Oh, I wouldn't say no to a banana," the Doctor replied, smiling at her. "Though I might have one in here, somewhere." He frowned, beginning to root through his first his coat pockets and then his suit pockets before giving up with a shrug. "Probably buried it, and with my luck, it'll have turned. But some tea would be lovely. Heats up the old synapses." Donna nodded, but the Doctor continued, saying, "Well, wait, no, this is America, and, forgive me, but you lot do need to learn how to make a good cup of tea. Perhaps I'd be safer with a lime soda?"

Donna gave the Doctor a second nod of affirmation. She was willing to overlook the apparent lack of anything in the Doctor's pockets and his eccentric behaviour, not to mention the fact that he could pose a threat to the Project's security. She was worried about Sam, and his safety as he was off leaping about in time was all that mattered to her right now. It hurt to see him fall in love with other women during his leaps, but she knew that if he had remembered her, even if only for a moment, he wouldn't think twice about them—and thus compromise his mission, his task, the one thing he needed to put right so that he could leap out again. But she did everything she could, back at the Project, and if this Doctor John Smith was offering to help, she wasn't going to refuse it, intruder or no intruder.

"What about you, Gooshie?" she asked, turning to her colleague.

"Nothing for me, thank you, Dr. Eleese."

The minute Donna left, the Doctor turned his manic grin on Gooshie. "Well, time's a-wasting, so it's best to get to work, isn't it?" He pulled something from one of his pockets—Gooshie felt he must not be the only one curious as to what was actually in there, for however little they seemed to contain, they certainly did contain something—and before Gooshie fully realized what was happening, the Doctor had pulled off one of Ziggy's side panels and was crawling into the gaping interior.

"Oh, bit dark in here, need to dig out my torch." There was some obvious shuffling, a satisfied 'aha!', and then the familiar click and burst of light from a flashlight. Gooshie wasn't about to comment; there could hardly be more surprises in the day, and this was a small enough mystery that it was easy to overlook. Plenty of tiny flashlights were manufactured, of course, even though the amount of light spilling out did seem to indicate a larger—

A flurry of sparks, a gunshot of an explosion, a small bit of smoke, and a fit of coughing brought Gooshie smartly out of his speculations. "What's going on?" he demanded, nervously and with much less authority than he should possess when delivering such a question.

"Nothing to worry about," came the cheery, if somewhat distant, response. "I'll have it fixed in a jiffy. Bit of faulty wiring, here, reacted the minute I turned on the sonic screwdriver…."

"Ziggy?" Gooshie turned to what he felt was the more reliable source of the two.

"The complication is minor," was the calm response. "I have been filtering data without those particular circuits for three point six weeks now."

"Why didn't you tell us something was wrong?" Gooshie exclaimed, shocked that they had missed some for that long. Didn't biweekly maintenance checks come up with anything?

"You didn't ask."

There was no point in arguing, of course. Ziggy would find a way to twist his words so that she would come out on top. Gooshie listened for a moment to a soft buzzing sound, but was unable to identify what it was. Some gadget the Doctor had, no doubt. He fervently hoped it was safe to use on Ziggy's systems. The last thing they needed was to be left without power in a lockdown.

"What are you using down there?" Gooshie asked carefully.

"Sonic screwdriver," came the answer. "Handy thing."

After another moment of silence, Gooshie found a question directed at him, "So tell me about this Project. I mean, I know the basics, I've gathered all that, but if this is experimental, why did Sam start it up before it was finished?"

Gooshie knew Al trusted the man who called himself the Doctor, but only to a certain point, and he didn't want to cross that line. They were, after all, in lockdown because the man had managed to infiltrate them. On top of that, he had already proven to be a threat to them—he'd broken into Ziggy's systems and corrupted her files. No amount of excuses was reason enough, as far as Gooshie was concerned. And he felt bad enough that he was the one who had let Doctor Smith at Ziggy in the first place. He didn't want to cause more trouble…. Though surely one answer wouldn't hurt, would it? "Dr. Beckett was fearful that funding would be cut before the Project would be completed, and he was determined to prove its worth."

"So he stepped into the trans—quantum accelerator prematurely, then? Blimey, he's lucky he didn't tear himself to shreds. But that's why you can't get him back? Because he wasn't finished his work? He'd asked me if the retrieval system worked for me, and, really, I didn't know what he was talking about, though I wasn't paying him my full attention, I must admit, not at that particular moment, more than a few other thoughts going around my head…."

"We have instituted a variety of retrieval methods," Gooshie said slowly, testing the waters, not quite willing to let this turn into a question-and-answer session. "Dr. Beckett even updated the program when he leaped back here. But throughout his first few leaps, when we were scrambling for ways to get him back, we did leave, as you would say, a number of traces. There was the blackout of the east coast in 1965—"

"You caused the 1965 blackout?" The Doctor's head reappeared from the maze of circuits and wires. "I remember that; I was in Buffalo, New York, can't remember why, really, and thought I'd end up chasing down the Yrandi, but I couldn't find any traces with my sonic screwdriver. Granted, it wasn't working like it was supposed to. There was some sort of interference..."

Gooshie, who wasn't entirely sure what the Doctor was talking about, tried to carry on the conversation. It was a safe, unremarkable topic—more or less. "Well, yes, Dr. Beckett did inadvertently cause the blackout when he was required to plug in that thousand watt hair dryer in accordance to Ziggy's instructions, but—"

"Oh, a _hair dryer_! I might've known! Blimey, I've got to get that fixed. And don't go on about it, dampers and a red setting, I know, but…." The Doctor trailed off, shaking his head before burying it again beneath Ziggy's panels.

The buzzing of the sonic screwdriver started up again, and Gooshie suddenly realized that the Doctor had been down there for at least five minutes, with no progress reports from either him or Ziggy. "What exactly are you doing, Dr. Smith, if I may ask?"

"Just…checking on things. Making sure they're in order." A pause. "Rewired one bit, nothing to worry about, just routed the circuitry around to a shorter path; ought to speed things up a bit."

Before Gooshie had a chance to question him, Donna returned with the Doctor's drink. She had a fresh cup of coffee for herself, although Gooshie suspected it was simply instant. On a plate sat three muffins. Donna offered one to Gooshie and he took it, thanking her. The Doctor emerged a few moments later, looking surprisingly none the worse for the wear, and dug into his banana muffin with gusto, saying it was the most delicious thing he'd had since his meal on Kymara.

"So where do you keep this quantum accelerator of yours?" the Doctor asked, licking the last of the crumbs from his fingers.

"I'll show you." Donna looked edgy—eager for the Doctor to finish his work, Gooshie supposed. "Gooshie, perhaps you'd best stay here and check Ziggy over again."

"Of course, Dr. Eleese."

"And Ziggy," Donna added, turning to the computer, "you were giving Al and Tina updates like Tina requested, right?"

"I would have, Dr. Eleese, but I believe they were busy."

The Doctor sputtered on his first big gulp of lime soda. Donna figured he wasn't used to coy parallel hybrid computers. Heck, she'd spent years with one, and Ziggy still managed to surprise her once in a while with the things she came out with, though this wasn't exactly one of the worst insinuations. The Doctor seemed to be recovering well, but as his coughing continued, she felt inclined to ask, "Is anything wrong?"

The Doctor was making faces as if he had tasted something foul. "Bleh, that's just…bleh. I thought I'd smelt a hint of that, but I really hadn't thought you'd try it. But…bleh, that taste's certainly distinctive enough." He frowned. "But better than cyanide, I'll give you that. Why do people insist on spiking drinks, I ask you?" He shook his head. "I thought you _wanted_ my help! And then you try to drug me! It's a very good thing that I have a very good metabolism. Doesn't hurt that I built up a bit of immunity, either, considering the last time, though this sort wasn't nearly as potent. You must have put enough in there to have a human out cold in five minutes. Well, twelve-and-a-half."

Donna was shocked. It was true that she _had_ tried to drug the Doctor. Nothing major, really, just a few sleeping pills, but…. She wanted to help Sam, but first she wanted to be sure that the Doctor would actually help them. To do that, she wanted to question him herself. Yes, she felt she could trust him, but she fought against that. She was a scientist. She needed facts, not feelings. She had been prepared for the day that someone would try to get at her through her feelings for Sam; she had simply thought that that day had come earlier than she'd anticipated.

Gooshie was staring at them. Donna figured he wasn't sure whether to defend her or not. Taking pity on him, she slowly began to explain. "Look, I'm sorry, I really am, but I am worried sick about Sam. I want to trust you, but I can't. You've got more strikes against you than for you. You've infiltrated the Project, you've wiped our records—"

"Only of Sam's last leap, and only that which pertained to me!" the Doctor protested.

"And I don't pretend to understand that, either," Donna countered. "You claim you're an alien. Al backs you up, and he'll have his reasons. But it's ludicrous, and—"

"Sam encountered the Anipalaxians before!" interrupted the Doctor. "That's why we met in the first place. They're aliens, and you aren't denying them." He looked at her imploringly. "I know you haven't had easy nights since this whole thing started. I can tell; that's why you'd be carrying around sleeping pills. But I am trying to help, and you lot just seem to want to lock me up. It's a very good thing, for me, that I've gotten Ziggy's recorders offline and blanked the tapes, because if you still were capturing every word I've said since I've come in here, I'd have to come back here all over again to cover my tracks."

The Doctor blew out his breath. "Now, you might not trust me, and you might find that _that_ is ample reason not to, and I wouldn't blame you, but if you're going to stop me from potentially saving Sam's life simply because you're trying to listen to _reason_, since it must be reason that's telling you that I'm a raving mad lunatic, then I'm afraid that I'll just have to go on without your approval, because I'm not going to let you stop me." Reaching out with both hands, he touched Donna's temples for a moment, closing his eyes. He caught her as she slumped forward in sleep. He let her down gently, looked up and winked at Gooshie, and then bounded out of the room.

Drills, tedious as they were, had not done much to quicken Gooshie's reaction time. "Admiral!" he yelled as soon as he regained his voice. "Dr. Smith's escaping!" And rounding on Ziggy, he started to question her. "Why didn't you tell us what he was doing?"

"He asked me not to."

"Ziggy!"

"He was very polite."

"But the Project—"

"I have approved his alterations to the schematics of the quantum accelerator."

"And you just—?"

"Dr. Beckett's chances of surviving the compounded stress of continual leaping will improve by 19.4 percent."

Before Gooshie could ask what the good Doctor Smith could possibly be doing to improve Dr. Beckett's chances to such an extent when they themselves, Ziggy included, had researched and poured over various designs in hopes of doing much the same, Al burst back into the room. He was dressed in one of his usual flamboyant outfits again. Tina followed half a moment later, looking slightly bedraggled.

"What's going on?" Al demanded. He heard Tina's strangled exclamation and, following her gaze, spotted Donna asleep on the floor. "What happened?"

"Dr. Smith—"

"I might've known." Al was fuming. What had it been, ten minutes? Ten glorious moments for him, no doubt, but a measly ten minutes? Fifteen, tops. "What's he doing?"

"I believe he was searching for the quantum accelerator," Gooshie replied, stumbling over his words in the reply and yet hesitant to say them. He had not, after all, tried to stop the Doctor; he had been too surprised to do anything at all.

"Dammit!" Al started out of the room, calling over his shoulder, "Ziggy, is that where he is?"

"Yes, Admiral."

"Good. Lock the other doors, will you? Gooshie, Tina, look after Donna. If she needs anything, Ziggy'll let you through to get it."

By the time Al had reached the room that housed the quantum accelerator, he was cursing in Italian. "Doctor!" he yelled, spotting a pair of trainers sticking out from the hole in the floor. "Explain yourself."

"I'm just doing you a favour," the Doctor said in answer, his voice muffled. "One installation, that's it. I promise." There was some scuffling, and the Doctor reappeared. Pulling his glasses off his face, he said, "You were there, Al. Sam saved my life. I just want to return the favour."

"By taking out one of my best scientists?" Al asked incredulously.

"If she'd slipped me something else, I could have ended up dying right in front of you, and believe me, you wouldn't want to see that." The Doctor shrugged. "It was easier this way, for her and for me. She would have worried, so she would have questioned me, and I can explain it all, and I know she'd understand some of it, given her education, but, really, you lot still can't grasp all the necessary concepts to have a true understanding of this, and if I can put in one small reverse magnetic temporal fluctuation stabilizer to repay a debt, then I will."

"So this is what you do, then? Go throughout our history and put in little things like this?" Al was cynical, and he knew the Doctor knew it.

"_Well_, technically I'm not supposed to interfere. But I have my reasons. Take the photo of me in the crowd the day Kennedy was assassinated. I can't destroy that now; it's part of my own timeline. If I did, then Clyde would have had a harder time piecing it all together, albeit incorrectly, and if he hadn't been there to explain it to Rose, she may not have found me again. And if she hadn't found me…." The Doctor trailed off. "There's no telling what would be different. I wouldn't be the same, not exactly."

Al raised an eyebrow, and the Doctor got the hint. "Point is," he said, "Sam's probably left similar traces. You can't accumulate too many of those before someone starts to try piecing something together. And the minute they do, you can't change anything. For the inexperienced, the more traces, the more likely something wrong will happen. Murphy's Law, really—it comes down to that. But these traces can sometimes attract Reapers. They never used to be a problem, before. But if something changes in history that's not supposed to, if time is damaged, then they will sterilize the wound. And that's not pretty. Trust me. I promised Sam that he wouldn't encounter them. Well, I didn't promise him, exactly, but I told the Anipalaxians that Sam would never meet them. And he won't. I'm just here to make sure of that."

"By installing your whatchamacallit?"

"Eh…it helps, certainly. You wouldn't understand all the details. It's complicated." A pause, just lengthy enough for the Doctor to notice Al's indignant look. "Very complicated."

"And I'm supposed to take your word for it that it works?" If anything, Al looked even more sceptical.

"It's not going to drain power off of you, if that's what you're thinking. You won't even know it's there. I've got a perception filter on it, anyway, so you won't even be able to find it. It'll just run in the background, keeping Sam away from fixed points. Easy enough while he stays in the past, but if the time ever comes that he leaps forward…." The Doctor trailed off. "You'd need it then."

"Well, then, if you're so good at fixing everything of ours, then fix the retrieval system." Al wasn't willing to betray his hope in his voice. He was still angry and sounded harsh, but if there was a chance that the Doctor could be guilted into doing something for them, Al was going to milk it for all it was worth. After all, even if the Doctor's tinkering didn't fix anything, it was unlikely that he could make it any worse.

The Doctor looked a bit pained. "No."

"You can't or you won't?"

"I won't because I can't. Well, I'm capable, but that's beside the point." The Doctor looked at Al imploringly. "I'm sorry, I'm so, so sorry, but Sam can't come back yet. He still has work to do; I can see it."

"Right." Al wished he'd brought a cigar with him; he needed the comfort now. "So you go on and on about helping us, but when it comes down to it, you won't."

"Remember what I said about Reapers?" the Doctor asked. He waited for Al to roll his eyes before continuing, "My people monitored the events in the time stream. We kept them at bay, preventing what should not happen. Now that I'm…alone…it's a bit more difficult to do that. But that's what I'm trying to do, right now. And don't think I'm just doing this because I'm supposed to—not me, I rebelled against authority time and again. I interfere. Far too much, supposedly. But even in all my interference, I'm still doing what I think is right. Reapers are a terror, a thing of nightmares, and I've faced worse. I am a nightmare, to your nightmares. I'm the Doctor. I fix things. I'm righting the wrongs. I—"

"So if you're so special," Al interrupted, "then why do we still have such a horrible history?"

"Well, fixed points, like I said before, or crossing my own timeline, or simply the fact that I am rather busy and can't be everywhere at once."

"You have a time machine." In spite of it all, that was one thing Al couldn't deny.

"Yes, the TARDIS, and I love her to bits, but if an event's happened for me, then I can't change it. I can put it back to the way it was supposed to be, if something's gone wrong, but I can't change it, not once I know how it's supposed to play out."

"And how do you know that?"

"I know." And something in the Doctor's face, or perhaps his tone of voice, made Al cease that particular line of questioning.

"So this thingamabob of yours—?"

"The reverse magnetic temporal fluctuation stabilizer. Right, five minutes, I'll have you set." The Doctor disappeared again, diving back into the hole he'd created. "The alternating attraction of the opposite poles with the converse negative repulsion creates a stasis that's akin to a rudimentary attempt at perpetual motion, though it's not the same, because this runs downs and recharges, like a car battery, different principles aside, and even if it is not always operating at the same rate, it's always running."

The explanation went over Al's head. He was a bit suspicious as to the truth in it, figuring the Doctor probably wasn't telling him everything, or even if what he was saying was in any way related to the device. Instead, Al chose to question the Doctor on a different topic, one that worried him more than another drain on Ziggy's power. "You told us to be careful, earlier, when we were dealing with Sam's next leap. What made you say that?"

"…. Spoilers."

The answer didn't come right away, and Al wasn't satisfied with it. "I don't care. You can tell me."

"Don't want to spoil the surprise."

"You're not making it sound like it's a pleasant one to begin with."

The Doctor didn't answer, and Al didn't press him, not yet. After a few moments of tinkering, the Doctor said slowly, "Sam's not the only one out there, you know. In time."

"Right, and I'm sure you can name off plenty of other time travellers. You probably have some sort of convention. _That_ would be an interesting get-together."

The Doctor snorted in laughter. "Well, there _is_ this one friend of mine who's given me as much grief as aid, I tell you, and the things he'd go on about to hear you say that! I keep disabling his vortex manipulator, but he does get around that every once in a while. I don't know what to do with him sometimes. I can't even stand to look at him. Gives me a headache. Sometimes I just have to grit my teeth and bear it."

Al waited, but the Doctor didn't continue. Dammit, the man was still dodging the questions put to him. He only seemed to answer the things he knew Al wouldn't be able to make heads or tails of. Sure, he did volunteer some comprehensible information, but it certainly wasn't anything Al could work with. And the knowledge that he had already hacked into Ziggy or somehow convinced her to allow him to do whatever he was doing was disturbing enough.

Al chose to go back, for a third time, to the topic of the Doctor's installation. "So this thing will make Sam's leaps safer? By keeping him away from these fixed points of yours?"

"Yup." Al waited the appropriate time for the predictable pause to pass and was satisfied to hear the Doctor continue this time. "Well, I might've added one more thing. Well, I say one, I mean two. Well, two and a half. Fixing your wiring aside, I am putting in a spatial temporal disturbance translocation mediating monitor, which will warn _me_ if Sam's liable to destroy himself when he leaps. I'll keep the correlating part with me in the TARDIS. The alarm'll sound if something's about to happen, and the data on the screen will tell me where and when. The other little installation of mine is an artron radiation detector, back in the other room. You shouldn't need it, but if it ever goes off, you'll know to bite your tongue more than usual. A person doesn't pick up artron radiation unless they've been through the Vortex, and I've calibrated it so it won't register the little your leapees may have. I don't know what sort of trouble you may attract here, at the Project's base, but I figure you'd best be prepared."

Al wasn't sure what the Doctor expected them to do with those installations, but he wasn't about to argue. "And this partial set up you were talking about?"

"_Well_…." The Doctor dragged the word out, as if he were reluctant to answer. "I _may_ have rewired things a bit to make an inhibitor, but as I've explained before, I can't leave traces."

"An inhibitor for what?" Al demanded, his suspicion returning with full force.

"Just to make sure Ziggy can't make another record of me in the time I spend here or in fact find out anything else, excluding, of course, what you already did manage to dig up, since they tend to be isolated facts anyway, and those connections have been made and I can't break them without potentially messing up a bit more than that, and trust me, you'll need to have Ziggy working perfectly for Sam's next leap."

Al fully intended to get proper answers out of the Doctor. He seemed to know where Sam was headed, and he did not make that future sound promising. But the Doctor had finished whatever he was doing and had scrambled out of the tangled mess beneath the floor and had replaced the flooring, chattering away the entire time about something completely unrelated, as if he specifically wanted to make sure that Al couldn't get a word in edgewise. So Al finally interrupted him. "You're loving this, aren't you?"

"Oh yes!" The Doctor grinned. "Every moment of it. Adventure's never over until everything's taken care of, and that's what I'm doing here. Taking care of things. Just a bit of patchwork. I'm putting all the odds and ends together and fixing things up, and then I'll be on my way."

"I expect you'll find that a bit difficult," Al shot back. "In case you've forgotten, we're in lockdown. We can't get out, so you certainly can't."

"But that's why I've got this. Well, this is _one_ of the reasons," the Doctor said, holding up a familiar cylindrical device. "Sonic screwdriver. Very handy. Works wonders for putting up shelves, for instance, and is also remarkably good at opening and closing things, including locked doors. Well, bit more trouble when it's wood, but that's not a problem here, and you lot haven't figured out deadlock seals yet." He had been moving when he was spouting off his explanation, and now he stood in front of the door. Holding his self-proclaimed sonic screwdriver out, he turned it on, and half a moment later, the door to the room began to open, sliding soundlessly upwards.

The Doctor ducked through before it had fully opened and then turned back to face a surprised Al. "And a bit of advice: trust yourself. You've got good instincts, all of you. Even when you're left scrambling, you still have to have faith that you can get yourselves through it. But you must never let yourself think anything is over for good. I've made that mistake, and the universe has proven me wrong time and again." The smile was a rueful one, but Al saw it only for a moment before the Doctor disappeared, taking off at a run down the corridor.

The next few moments were all jumbled together. Ziggy was alarmed that the Doctor was still able to escape, and on top of that, security on the top floor had apparently thought that the man was _free_ to go, lockdown or no! Al had questioned them, and they insisted that the Doctor had documentation signed by _him_ that he was able to leave the building. So of course they didn't bother tracking him down, and Ziggy's security cameras went on the blink shortly after the Doctor got outside, and he was long gone by the time they came back online.

To make matters worse, Al was being contacted by the Committee who wanted to know why Ziggy had gone into lockdown in the first place, which left Al to invent a story that there had been some sort of miscommunication, since he obviously couldn't say that they'd gone into lockdown because of an intruder who had escaped their grasp when they no longer had any record of an intruder in the first place. This brought fault to Ziggy's systems, and Al had to convince them that they were not simply a waste of money and that the Project was important enough for funding to continue. Al supposed he would have to come up with some sort of proof to back up his words when he actually met with them the next day, face-to-face.

While he'd been dealing with that, Donna had awoken, and Tina had had to spend time calming and reassuring her. Al wasn't sure how Tina explained it. Maybe she didn't. But because she was preoccupied, Gooshie was left trying to do her job and his while dealing with an overworked Ziggy. Verbeena had been contacted and was thankfully on her way, scheduled to arrive in three hours. Al fervently hoped she could cut that time in half somehow, because it hadn't even been a full ten minutes before the Waiting Room was occupied and Ziggy was spewing out information about Sam. This, however, didn't last long. Leap date and location, and then full out panic, far worse than last time. Her circuits were overloading and she started spitting gibberish at them, leaving them to try to avoid sudden electrical discharges while trying to make sense out of her words.

Sam was in Oakland, California, on March 19, 1966. But he had leaped into Jimmy LaMotta, and it was the first time in over eighty leaps that he had been the same person twice. It threw Ziggy for a loop; something had gone wrong with the original history. Something had changed, setting it off its intended course, the course that Sam had righted, and now he was back there to fix it. But that made no sense. It wasn't possible. Yet it was happening.

It was different from last time, Al realized, though he couldn't put his finger on why he was certain about that. Something didn't sit right with him this time around. Their best bet for answers was Jimmy himself. It would be a while before they could get the Imaging Chamber online, even with Ziggy operating at maximum capacity. But Sam would be able to handle it. He'd been Jimmy before. He knew what to do. He'd be able to coast along until Al could come see him, to visit and see if he'd figured something out. But in the meantime, Al didn't mind visiting with Jimmy. Al had a soft spot for the kid, and he wouldn't mind seeing him again. He just hoped everything would work out. And with Sam, it had to, somehow. It always did.

_Fin_

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A/N: I'm afraid that many of the QL characters are probably out of character, and if anyone has any suggestions, I'll see if I can go back and fix it up a bit. As for Donna crushing up some sleeping pills, well, I figured she'd _want_ to trust the Doctor with all her heart, but her _mind_ wouldn't want to let her, which is what I was trying to convey. Anyway, that's it. I thoroughly enjoyed writing this and I hope that some of you will review to tell me what you thought. Thanks for reading this.


	8. Splintering

A/N: This is a tag to _Splintering_, which will follow _Patchwork_ (albeit not immediately within either television series), and in which I will _try_ to redeem myself and fix my out-of-characterness without actually changing the original ending to _Patchwork_. I do not promise to succeed, but I do intend to try, bearing in mind what I've put in place in _Patchwork_. I had never intended to write a sequel to _Patchwork_, but this idea kept floating around in my head, so we'll see how it turns out. Also, a quick thanks to Anonymous-cat for answering my random questions about Project Quantum Leap as I tried to hammer out a storyline!

* * *

Dr. Sam Beckett blinked for a moment, trying to get his bearings. When his vision didn't clear up entirely, he realized that it was night. Still, it took a few long moments for his eyes to adjust, and he focussed on his other senses instead. Cool, bit of a wind. Wet grass. He could smell the sharp scent of manure, meaning he was either on a farm or in a nearby pasture. He'd thought he'd heard some movement in front of him at first, and for a brief moment he'd thought it was simply the livestock, but at any rate there was now no denying the fact that someone was coming up behind him. Quickly, and breathing rather heavily, but moving noisily enough to convince him that whoever it was didn't intend to harm him.

He was so wrapped up in his thoughts, however, that he'd missed the woman's first words. He turned to look at her, willing her to repeat herself, and tried to place her. Her clothes didn't look dissimilar to those of his own time—or at least they weren't a far cry from the average fashions he remembered. Then again, he hadn't ever paid it that much mind, and it had been a few years. Still, he must be close to his own time.

"Doctor?" the black woman asked, sounding a bit hesitant. She shifted on her feet, and he caught sight of something behind her. Parallel lines of standing stones. Short, most small and weathered, but still visible in the moonlight. Millennia old, he was sure, but with an unknown purpose. It was fascinating. Still, something was niggling at the back of his mind—he _knew_ where those stones stood. Why couldn't he think of it?

The British woman was talking again, and though he snapped his attention back to her, he almost missed her question. Perhaps he would have time to study the stones later. For now, he had to finish the conversation. Dragging his wandering gaze back to meet her worried one, he said, "Yes, yes, I'm fine." It didn't come out clearly, unfortunately. He had a bit of a frog in his throat.

She was frowning at him. "You don't look fine," she declared. "Did something happen or something that I should know about?"

Sam started, feeling a bit nervous. She was observant, which meant she would be a good deal harder to fool. He had to wonder when Al would turn up to tell him what he had leaped in here to do. Carefully, he asked, "What do you mean?"

Before, she'd looked like she'd been fighting back a smile, but now it faded and she looked genuinely concerned. Finally, she replied in a tone of false casualness, "Oh, I don't know. Maybe time went a bit wibbly-wobbly on you?"

Sam stared at her. Did she _know_? But how could she know? Wouldn't she have said something if she could see him? Well, no, of course she couldn't see him as him; she'd called him 'doctor', and he could only assume that his host was a doctor. He blinked, mentally pushing his thoughts back. "We should be going," he said instead, the words coming out in a rush.

"If you say so," she agreed, sounding almost wary, "but I hope you can track them, because we'll have lost them by now."

Wondering what she could possibly be talking about, Sam tried to quell his sudden bout of panic. He'd been through this sort of thing before. He could do it again. "You don't think you want to—?" He broke off, expecting her to lead them off somewhere. What were they _doing_here, anyway? Neither of them had so much as a flashlight.

She looked uncertain. "Oh, um, well…. No, no, it's okay, we don't have to."

He looked at her in confusion for a moment before regaining his stride. "But if we're supposed to—"

Her mouth opened, and a look of comprehension dawned on her face. She was clearly getting more out of the conversation than he was. "Oh! You were asking if I wanted to—? Doctor, if you're not well, we shouldn't…. You said they don't really do any _harm_, anyway. Right? They just sort of move things around for a bit of fun? You know, keys and things, and people find them later?" She looked at him for a moment as if waiting for some sort of response before adding, "We can deal with them after we sort this."

She wasn't making any sense. Who were _they_? Were the two of them trying to track down a pair of hooligans, some teenage boys whose idea of fun had gone just a bit too far? If so, why wouldn't they wait until daylight, or at least bring something with them so that they could see? Surely the man he'd leaped into wasn't in the habit of trekking through pastures in the dark with nothing to guide him. And the woman had been _running_. Or, at the very least, _jogging_. She was lucky she hadn't gotten her foot caught in a hole, falling to twist her ankle. The ground was uneven enough to make that a distinct possibility.

A bit alarmed because his lack of knowledge about the situation meant he had to tread _very _carefully, and because the woman now looked less certain of herself than she had before, Sam nodded to her and said, "Lead on."

She looked at him blankly for a moment. "You're kidding, right?" The looked shifted to one of incredulity. "I was following you. I'm not sure where we are."

"Oh, boy," Sam muttered, rolling his eyes upward, silently praying to God or Time or Fate or whatever was actually leaping him through time to send Al to him sooner rather than later. This leap hadn't started off with gunshots, and for that he was grateful, since he didn't seem to be in any immediate danger, but past experience didn't make the future seem particularly comforting. The sooner he found out why he was there, the easier it would be to fix whatever had gone wrong.

He knew all too well what happened if he just assumed that he was here to fix something and acted on that assumption, with Al turning up too late to correct him. He didn't want to risk doing something like that again.

Trouble was, if Al didn't turn up soon…. He might not have a choice.


End file.
